Ichiro Suzuki had two hits yesterday, and by one form of accounting that gives him one more hit in his career than Pete Rose had while setting the Major League record — with 4,256 hits.

It seems some are going to suggest that makes Suzuki the MLB “hit king”, displacing Rose, but that is not accurate for one very simple reason.

Suzuki has “only” 2,979 hits in the Major Leagues.

The rest of his “top-tier” hits (as his wiki page describes them), 1,278 in total, came in the Pacific League of his home country, Japan.

The Pacific League is one of two leagues that comprise Nippon Professional Baseball, in Japan.

Those two leagues play at a high level, almost certainly the highest in the world — aside from Major League Baseball in the U.S. and Canada.

And taking Suzuki’s 1,278 hits in Japan and adding them to his 2,979 in MLB is very much an apples and oranges thing. It doesn’t work. Just as elite European basketball players cannot bring their statistics with them when they join the NBA. They start from scratch — as did Ichiro Suzuki when he made his MLB debut in 2001 with the Seattle Mariners.

Pete Rose remains the MLB-record holder for hits, 4,256.

Suzuki is not diminished by any of this. He is one of greatest ballplayers of the past two decades, the greatest slap hitter to play the game.

He is the active career MLB leader in singles, with 2,428, which puts him in the upper crust of contact hitters in baseball history.

But it also points up how his mountain of hits led to a somewhat muted production level. Singles account for 81.5 percent of his hits (singles were 75.5 percent of Rose’s total), a factor in his never reaching 70 RBI in a season, despite enormous plate-appearance totals.

Suzuki, 42, is having what might be one final strong season, with the Miami Marlins, for whom he is batting .349. He is likely to get his 3,000th MLB hit before the season ends, and that is quite an accomplishment in its own right.

He is a sure first-ballot Hall of Famer. His run of 10 consecutive 200-plus-hits seasons (2001-2010) is mind-boggling, as is the 262 hits he put up in 2004, when he broke George Sisler’s 84-year-old record for most hits in a season, 257 (in 1920).

He was an excellent right fielder, winning 10 consecutive Gold Glove awards through 2010, and an accomplished base-stealer, with 504 steals against 116 caught-stealing — an excellent success rate of 81.3 percent.

He played nine seasons with the Orix Blue Wave and was already 27 years old when he got to the Major Leagues. It is very possible he would have surpassed Rose’s hit total, had he played the whole of his career on this side of the Pacific Ocean, but we will never know.

It must be noted that Major League Baseball is played at a higher standard than is achieved by Japan’s two top leagues. Some of Japan’s most successful players were foreigners, particularly from the U.S., who had insignificant MLB careers. Randy Bass and LeRon Lee, for example.

Ichiro Suzuki, a hell of a player, and a hell of a pro, and the best at what he did — reach base, steal bases, score runs, play the outfield.

But he did nine years of it in at a lower level of competition than he has seen since 2001.

Pete Rose remains an unsavory character, on baseball’s banned list for his gambling activities. He also remains baseball’s official hit king.