page_title: List of Major League Baseball records considered unbreakable
section_title: Most hits in a season – 262
hierarchical_section_title: List of Major League Baseball records considered unbreakable / Batting / Most hits in a season – 262
caption_attribution_description: English: Seattle Mariners right fielder Ichiro Suzuki (51) in action during the Seattle Mariners at Baltimore Orioles game on May 11, 2011.
context_page_description: Some Major League Baseball records may be regarded as "unbreakable" due to having been initially set by either freak occurrences or during the early decades of baseball when certain rules, techniques, and fundamentals were in place that have since drastically evolved, making it almost impossible to replicate such feats in today's game. Others are due to changes in the game over time, shifts of focus one way or another over a generation or decades in some cases and much shorter spans in others, which make it seem unlikely the marks will be broken when viewed through today's lenses. Outliers, however, can appear at any time, and do, accounting for many previously regarded as "unbeatable" records being broken – and in some cases re-broken.
context_section_description: Set by Ichiro Suzuki in 2004, breaking a record that had been set in 1920 by George Sisler (257), this record is only fifteen seasons old and thus its longterm durability is debatable. Changes to the game and how it is broadly approached have an effect on any record's longevity. Writing shortly before Ichiro retired, the aforementioned Miller noted that the only active player who had collected more than 225 hits in any season was Ichiro himself, who exceeded that total three times in all. The next highest total since 2000 was 240 hits, batted by Darin Erstad in the 2000 season.
  
  Miller added that in today's game, "few elite hitters are as walk-averse as Ichiro was permitted to be", which he argued was a necessity for a player to be able to approach the record. The MLB leader in at-bats in 2018 was Trea Turner with 664; a player with that number of at-bats would have to hit .396 to reach 263 hits—a batting average that Miller himself had argued in 2018 was unapproachable in the modern game. He added,
  The outer limit for at-bats – say, a leadoff hitter for a high-scoring team who plays every game and has a 10th-percentile walk rate – is perhaps 725, nine higher than the all-time record. And even the 725-AB guy would need to hit .363, a mark not met by any hitter in this decade.
caption: Ichiro Suzuki only began his Major League career at 27 after nine record-setting seasons in Japan.  He holds the mark for most hits in a season (262) and may well have set it for most career hits had he played entirely in MLB.
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