Ichiro Suzuki was inducted in baseball’s Hall of Fame on Sunday.

Ichiro Suzuki was inducted in baseball’s Hall of Fame on Sunday, in a class with Billy Wagner, CC Sabathia, Dick Allen, and the recently deceased Dave Parker. The first Japanese position player in Major League history is a worthy inductee. He was a genuinely great player for his first ten seasons in MLB, batting .331/.376/.430, averaging 224 hits a year (never fewer than 206) and playing almost 159 games a year, and by modern metrics compiling a 117 OPS+ and 54.8 Wins Above Replacement thanks to superb defense and baserunning. Ichiro’s style was, as I wrote a month after his arrival in 2001, a throwback to old-time baseball: “We should appreciate the slender Japanese right fielder for bringing back a little glamor and pizzazz to the single, the original foundation of baseball’s offensive game. There really is an art to spraying the ball to all fields and just dropping balls between fielders, and it can be an entertaining part of a game that is played at its best when teams have a balance of each of its elements.” Moreover, his career is that much more impressive when you consider that he was already 27 years old in his 2001 rookie campaign — an especially late start for a guy who relied on speed and defense. As I detailed at length in 2016, Ichiro’s 4,367 hits across MLB and the Japan Pacific League (where he batted .353/.421/.522 from age 18-26) likely represents a fair estimate, and maybe a low one, of how many hits he would have amassed in MLB had he started in the United States. That may not displace Pete Rose as the “Hit King,” but it surely makes Ichiro a legitimate rival.

Ichiro’s induction speech is worth 20 minutes of your time. The speech is full of gratitude and humor appropriate to the occasion, but it also reflects the stern lessons that made Ichiro a baseball legend. I quote at length below:

Baseball taught me to make value decisions about what is important. It helped shape my view of life and the world as a kid. I thought I could play baseball forever. The older I got, I realized the only way to keep playing the game I love at the highest level was to dedicate myself to it completely.

When fans use their precious time to come watch you play, you have a responsibility to perform for them, whether we are winning by 10 or losing by 10. I felt my duty was to [be] motivated the same from opening day through game 162. I never started packing my equipment or taping boxes until after the season’s final out. I felt it was my professional duty to give fans my complete attention each and every game. Fans deserve to be entertained whenever they choose to come.

Baseball taught me what it means to be a professional. And I believe that is the main reason I am here today, not because my skills are better than others. . . . I could not have achieved the numbers the writers recognized me for without paying attention to the many small details every single day consistently for all 19 seasons. I personally cared for my equipment each day because I never wanted to risk a fielding error due to a loose string on my glove, or slip on the base path because I didn’t clean my spikes. Beyond the regular season, I had a serious routine in the offseason, too. When I showed up at the camp each spring, my arm was already in shape. . . .

If you consistently do the little things, there is no limit what you can achieve. Look at me. I’m 5’11” and 170 pounds. When I came to America, many people said I was too skinny to compete with bigger major leaguers. The first time I ran out on the field, I was in awe of the competition. But I knew if I stuck to my beliefs about preparation, I could overcome the doubts — even my own.

I have been asked, what’s the best thing you can do for your team? My answer is taking responsibility for yourself. Being responsible for yourself means answering to yourself. When you go home at night, and wonder why you didn’t get a hit, or you didn’t make a catch, the honest answer is not because a great pitcher beat you or a tough sun was in your eyes. It’s because there was something you could have done better. By taking responsibility for yourself, you support your teammates and you don’t cheat the fans.

As a kid, my dream was always to be a professional baseball player. I even wrote an essay about it when I was in grade six. If I could rewrite that essay today with what I know now, I would use the word goal instead of dream. Dreams are not always realistic, but goals can be possible if you think deeply about how to reach them. Dreaming is fun, but goals are difficult and challenging. It’s not enough to say I want to do something. If you are serious about it, you must think critically about what is necessary to achieve it.

That’s a great message for any young person, not just a ballplayer. It also reflects a profoundly Japanese outlook. Japan has come a very long way since 1853, when American ships first arrived in a society then stuck in the 17th century, in which 7 to 10 percent of the population were samurai who aspired to live by the harsh disciplinary philosophy of bushido. Baseball was introduced early to Japan by Americans even before the 1871 birth of MLB’s predecessor, was organized in teams by the 1870s, and became a professional sport by the 1920s. Modern Japan may bear few of the hallmarks of the samurai, who were abolished as a class in the 1870s, and whose warrior ethos fell into disfavor after World War II, but some elements of the bushido ethos have always remained in Japanese baseball, especially before Hideo Nomo in the 1990s and Ichiro in the 2000s began breaking barriers between the American and Japanese games. Ichiro’s philosophy still reflects that stern self-discipline.

It’s interesting to contrast his approach to the credo of Christy Mathewson, the great pitcher who began in MLB a century before Ichiro and was known both for his fierce competitiveness and his gentlemanly demeanor. As Mathewson wrote late in his career:

You can’t afford to admit that any opponent is better than you are. So, if you lose to him there must be a reason — a bad break. You must have an alibi to show why you lost. If you haven’t one, you must fake one. Your self-confidence must be maintained. . . . But keep it to yourself. That’s where it belongs. Don’t spread it around. Lose gracefully in the open. To yourself, lose bitterly — but learn. You can learn little from victory. You can learn everything from defeat.

Mathewson’s view of keeping an alibi for yourself reflects, perhaps, not only his cultural and generational differences from Ichiro but also the greater need among pitchers for a sop to their self-confidence. But his public-facing approach, like Ichiro’s, was to give your all, never stop adjusting and improving, and never dodge accountability. Both men’s views reflect why we love sports: not only because they are exciting, elegant, and tribal, but also because they push the virtues that produce excellence to the testing point.