Old foes praise Ichiro’s greatness as a hitter

Maybe it’s an exaggerated recollection, because ballplayers have been known to weave tapestries out of tall tales.

But Jon Lester claims that somewhere among the more than 30,000 pitches he’s thrown in his time in the big leagues was a curveball that bounced in the Seattle dirt — “It barely reached the cut of the grass,” Lester said — and then into the bat of one Ichiro Suzuki, who turned the bouncer into one of his now 3,000 base hits.

No article or video could be found to corroborate Lester’s story, though the Internet — always attempting to be an accommodating accomplice — does provide some grainy evidence of Ichiro smacking a bouncing ball in Japan.

Ichiro amazingly hits a pitch that bounces in the dirt

So it’s certainly feasible.

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But whether this specific account is accurate or not is hardly the point. The point is that Ichiro’s legend as a creative compiler of base knocks is so cemented that such a claim, at the very least, feels emotionally accurate.

“That’s how hand-eye coordinated he is,” Lester said, “how unique he is. There’s a reason he has a million hits.”

OK, more exaggeration there. But after ripping a triple off the Coors Field wall Sunday, Ichiro does now have 3,000 stateside, and 4,278 in his professional career. You can question — as Pete Rose and many others have — the value of grouping the U.S. total and the Japanese total into one lump sum, and that’s totally fine and fair. But there’s no denying that this is a man spectacularly gifted at the art of hitting.

And no group of people is more qualified to confirm that than the pitchers he’s burned along the way.

John Lackey leads the list, having served up 36 of the 3,000, though he’s quick — and accurate — in pointing out that he leads …

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