The Pietist Schoolman

As recent episodes of our new sports history podcast have touched on the history of the NCAA, debates over amateurism, and the role of sports in college admissions, we’ve talked a lot about student-athletes. So it seemed like it was high time we talked to a couple of actual student-athletes.

This week on The 252 we’re joined by Bethel University students Jana Roste (a senior math education/physical education double-major and slugging outfielder for the Royals’ softball team) and her younger brother Jaran (a sophomore accounting and business/political science double-major who is the Royals’ starting quarterback, after spending a redshirt freshman season with the University of Minnesota). They shared their stories of growing up playing multiple sports in a small city in western Minnesota, what it’s like to balance academic and athletic commitments in Division III, how sports connects to their faith as Christians, and how Jana is facing the end of her athletic career.

Jana and Jaran in action – photos: Bethel University Athletic Department

In addition, we celebrated the career of Ichiro Suzuki, debated whether major league baseball could become a trans-Pacific enterprise, and checked in on our March Madness brackets.

As always, you can download or stream episodes of The 252 at Podbean, and follow us — with the rest of our Live from AC2nd podcasting colleagues — at Facebook.

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Let me add a mea culpa here: on the fly, I strenuously insisted that Ichiro Suzuki was a vastly better player than Pete Rose… perhaps even comparable to the great (and horrible) Ty Cobb. A quick perusal of baseball-reference.com shows that the numbers don’t bear out either comparison. Here are those three players’ career totals if you start with their age 27 season (when Ichiro started his MLB career):

	Years	WAR	Slash Line	OPS+	Hits	SB
Ty Cobb	1914-1928	87.6	.365/.441/.510	160	2589	444
Pete Rose	1968-1986	61.5	.305/.381/.408	120	3357	158
Ichiro Suzuki	2001-2019	59.4	.311/.355/.402	107	3089	509

Now, Ichiro’s performance clearly tailed off badly in the second half of his MLB career. But even if you look at the same measures from each player’s single best streak of five seasons from age 27 on, Ichiro is roughly similar to Rose… and both are still far behind Cobb (whose best seasons actually preceded his 27th birthday). I think Ichiro was clearly the best defender of the three, but I doubt fielding overcomes the other statistical differences.

	Years	WAR	Slash Line	OPS+	Hits	SB
Ty Cobb	1915-1919	40.9	.377/.452/.516	187	986	281
Pete Rose	1972-1976	31.4	.314/.396/.425	133	1038	31
Ichiro Suzuki	2001-2005	29.9	.332/.377/.442	120	1130	190