I wonder how much Ichiro brought in his first 5 or so years. I know he is a complete exception to the rule, but still curious. he might have done it, if only because you had japanese people and pac nw people buying mariners [expletive], and his salary was really low when he came over (less than $5m per year). but yeah he obviously is a huge outlier because he really had two fan bases, and also no asian position player had ever really had much success in mlb, so the big dollars weren't available to him until he proved he could hit mlb pitching.