Miscellaneous Baseball Thoughts

As the baseball season winds down - people pay attention to the obvious playoff races like the NL West and the NL Wildcard but there are also less obvious things at stake like the race for last in the AL East. Before the season started Lou Pinella guaranteed that Tampa Bay would not finish last this year. Yet with only a handfull of games left they are only a 1/2 game up on Toronto (who equally would like to avoid finishing last).... With a record of 75-78 - Cleveland is battling to make it to .500 for the season... Manny Ramirez has an OBP of .399. That's good for 5th best in the AL this year but if Manny finishes with an OBP of less than .400 - that would snap a streak of five straight seasons over .400 OBP (2004 would make it six straight). Six straight seasons would be impressive but just for historical purposes consider that Ted Williams started off his career with 17-straight seasons of an OBP over .400 (and that was before they really even knew about OBP!)... I don't think San Diego will win the NL Wildcard (4.5 back of the Cubs right now) but their turn-around from their disastrous 2003 season has been one of the stories of the year and a story that has mainly been overlooked. Right now San Diego is 11 games over .500. In 2003 they finished 34 games under .500. The Padres are definitely the team to watch in 2005... In 1920 George Sisler had 257 hits to set the record that Ichiro is trying to break. However, Sisler also had 399 total bases (only 171 singles) and a batting average of .407 (his OPS+ for 1920 was 181). Ichiro is 10 hits shy of Sisler's record but he already has 211 singles and "only" 304 total bases. I'm not trying to take anything away from Ichiro because breaking the record is a great accomplishment. I just wanted to point out the totally different type ways the record was reached.... Happy 33rd birthday to Kevin Millar!