As the lanky teenager with the curious leg kick to his unorthodox batting form for the Hilo Stars of Hawaii Winter Baseball, it was hard to know what to make of Ichiro Suzuki in 1993.

Twenty years later, it is his place in the baseball record books that defies easy classification and invites discussion.

He is one of the best hitters to ever slap, slash or sting a base hit — on either side of the Pacific Ocean.

But precisely because his exploits are divided between Japan and Major League Baseball, he prompts a dialogue the type of which the game has rarely encountered.

Ichiro reached a milestone 4,000th hit Wednesday, placing him behind only Pete Rose (4,256) and Ty Cobb (4,189) on the all-time hit parade.

That’s if you combine the 2,722 hits he’s accomplished in the uniforms of the New York Yankees and Seattle Mariners with the 1,278 he managed with the Orix Blue Wave.

Problem is, many people don’t.

Had Ichiro come to the MLB sometime after the 1994 season, in which he won the first of his seven batting titles in Japan, instead of making his Mariners debut in 2001 at age 27, he’d already have long rounded 3,000 hits in this country and probably be closing in on 3,500 now at age 39.

But ballplayers from Japan rarely entertained a move to the U.S. back then and Ichiro was the first position player to boldly make the breakthrough.

Without the lessons learned from his stay in Hawaii, where he led the Stars to the inaugural title, he might have gotten even a later start. Clyde Nekoba, who was the Stars’ general manager, recalls a gifted ballplayer — one who had yet to adopt the single name persona — with “all the tools. I thought he had the potential to be a good hitter but never imagined he would do this well,” Nekoba said. “People are funny, they’ll say, ‘Oh, yeah, I knew he was going to be big time,’ but that’s bull.”

After hitting .311 in Hawaii, including a memorable 500-foot plus home run dubbed the “Shinkansen” at Vidinha Stadium on Kauai, he returned to Japan to set a record for hits in a season and win three MVP titles.

He credits competing against top U.S. prospects here with “giving me confidence” and being on his own, away from his Japan coaches, with providing the maturity to “produce results.”

When he joined the Mariners, Ichiro won rookie of the year and MVP titles, beginning a streak of 10 consecutive years of 200 hits or more and broke George Sisler’s 84-year-old record for the most hits in a season (262 in 2004).

By any measure, Ichiro has carved a place among the elite, one well-executed base hit at a time. Indeed, even if you combined MLB and minor league hits, MLB says only three others — Hank Aaron (3,771 in bigs; 324 in minors), Stan Musial (3,630 in majors, 371 in minors) and Arnold John “Jigger” Statz, who managed 737 of his 4,093 pro hits in the majors — would reach 4,000.

Ichiro will be seeing most of them in Cooperstown.

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Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.