Some very strange facts to wrap our minds around Ichiro's incredible hits milestone

He's stolen our hearts and revolutionized our fashion for years, and now, Ichiro etched his name into baseball history. With his double in the ninth inning of Wednesday's Marlins-Padres game, he's now sitting on 4,257 hits (counting both his nine seasons in Japan and 16 in MLB). Pete Rose finished his career with 4,256 hits in the Majors.

4,257! That's an incredible number -- so incredible, in fact, that it can be tough to put it truly into perspective. Luckily, though, we've got some mind-blowing facts to help us all wrap our heads around the majesty that is Ichiro. 
1. Those 4,257 hits have resulted in an unbelievable 5,733 total bases -- meaning that, over the course of his career, Ichiro has traveled 515,970 feet around the bases. That's just over 97 miles, which would take him all the way from New York to Philadelphia.
2. The next closest active player on the hit-leaders list is Alex Rodriguez, who has 3,098 for his career -- 37 percent fewer than Ichiro. For comparison, Peyton Manning holds the NFL record for career passing touchdowns with 539. For a quarterback to break that record by as much as Ichiro currently leads the field, he would have to throw 738 TDs over his career, or roughly 30 a year for 25 years.
3. If every one of Ichiro's hits were one foot, stacked on top of each other, you would need the Burj Khalifa (the tallest building in the world, at 2,717 feet), the Empire State Building and another 30-story apartment building to get to the top.
4. Back in 2013, Joey Chestnut set a new world record by eating 69 hot dogs in 10 minutes at the Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest. Which is impressive, until you consider that, if every one of Ichiro's hits were a hot dog, it would take more than 61 Joey Chestnuts to wolf down all of those meat sandwiches. (Yes, we said meat sandwiches.) 
5. According to U.S. Census data from 2015, there are 14,423 incorporated towns with a population less than 4,257.  
6. If you've ever found yourself watching an X-Men movie and wondering just how many X-Men there could possibly be, you're not alone: The best guess -- defining "X-Men" as anybody who attended Professor Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters -- is 244, which means that you'd need seventeen full rosters of X-Men each hitting a single to reach Ichiro's heights. Which seems pretty difficult, even for Colossus.
7. The last three teams that Ichiro has played for -- the 2014 Yankees, 2015 Marlins and 2016 Marlins -- have had a total of 153 different players on their active rosters. That's a lot! Naturally, if you were to add up all of those different jersey numbers, that would be a pretty high number. And yet: The sum of all those uniforms is 4,487, just a couple hundred more than baseball's new hit king.
8. The average Ichiro single takes about four seconds, from home plate to first. His average double lasts for 9.5 seconds, triples for 12 seconds and homers for 22 seconds. What do all of these numbers mean? It means that, were you to watch every single hit of Ichiro's career from home plate 'til he reached base, it would take you about seven hours -- or, roughly, the entire original Star Wars trilogy, with about 45 minutes left over to hotly debate whether or not Han shot first. (He absolutely did.)