A little MLB news

So with the regular season winding down in baseball I thought I would talk a little bit about baseball, instead of doing another post on football.

Today Ichiro Suzuki of the Seattle Mariners hit his 200th hit of the season against the Toronto Blue Jays. This marks the 10th time he has done that in the major leagues, and he has done them in 10 straight seasons. That is an amazing statistic, no player in MLB history has gotten 200 hits in 10 straight seasons, only one other player has 10 seasons with 200 or more hits. That player is the hits king himself, Charlie Hustle AKA Pete Rose. Anytime you share a record with Rose, you know you are doing something right. The really crazy part about Ichiro's success is that he has only been in the major leagues for 10 seasons. He has hit at least 200 hits in every single season he has played in the major leagues. Ichiro joined the Seattle Mariners during the 2001 season at the age of 26. Ichiro is now approaching the age of 37, yet he continues to lead the league in hits. Why am I mentioning this? Imagine if he spent his entire career in MLB instead of playing in Japan. Had he played in the majors his whole career, we would probably be looking at him being the all time hits leader. Right now he has 2,230 hits in 10 seasons. That’s an average of 223 a season. A pretty amazing number, also given his career batting average of .331. What I am trying to say is that Ichiro should be regarded as one of the top hitters of all time in baseball, and sadly he does not get enough recognition because he plays in Seattle. Seattle does not get a lot of press coverage, and they aren't exactly the best organization in pro sports. Imagine if he played in New York or Boston, every night people would be talking about his hustle, his energy and how well he plays. Ichiro will be a first ballot HOF'er and should be regarded as one of the elite hitter to ever play the game.

Now that I am off of my 'Ichiro Rules' soap box I want to talk a little bit about a few things that could change in baseball to make it more exciting. There has been a lot of talk about expanding the use of instant replay in baseball. I think that there should be more usage of IR, and most people agree. The problem is MLB commissioner Bud Selig (who is by far my most hated commissioner, he sucks I'll explain in another post I'm sure). Selig is a traditionalist, so to speak. He doesn't want to change the game; he wants it to stay the same it’s been. Maybe that is why he didn't do drug testing for steroids; they didn't do it before right? His lack of action and him knowing that there was a problem, has lead baseball to be covered in a dark cloud. Selig should expand IR for everything but balls and strikes. I agree that the umpires call balls and strikes right most of the time and we don't need to challenge every strike that we think is a ball. Fair or foul balls, base-runners being safe and home runs (which they already use) would be great in baseball. A blown call by umpire Jim Joyce cost Tigers SP Armando Galarraga a perfect game. Galarraga had allowed no hits through 8 and 2/3rds innings. He had one more out to go. Galarraga had the hitter ground out, and seemed to be out at first base. Tiger’s fans and players started to rejoice until umpire Joyce ruled that the hitter was safe. Sadly there was no way for Joyce to take back his call, Joyce admitted that he made a mistake and said he felt horrible for the blown call. A simple use of IR would have given Galarraga a perfect game in the books, even though we all know he through a perfect game.

Umpires are human, so they will make mistakes. We do not want these mistakes to cost a team a win, especially in the postseason. Expand the use of IR Selig, don't mess up baseball even more than you already have.

There other thing I would change would be to add one more wild card team to each league's playoff. So you would have a total of 5 teams in the playoffs in the American and National Leagues. The cool part would be how the system would work out. I've read a few different columns about this and I really like the way it sounds. You have the two wildcard teams in each league play each other in a 3 game series. Kind of like the play-in game in the NCAA men's basketball tourney. You'd have both team’s play each other and the winner would go on and play and the playoffs would resume like normal. The only downside to this is when would you have the two teams play? Baseball tries it’s hardest to end the World Series before November, and often time’s baseball is being played at the beginning on November. There has been talk of shortening the regular season to about 154 games or so, but most owners don't want to take a cut on games, that means less money. If baseball can find a way to get the play in series to work, I would love to see it happen, it would be exciting and would make winning your division that make more important.

With the playoffs approaching I thought I would give some early predictions. Right now the Rays pitching has been struggling and I don't see them being able to beat the Yankees in a 5 or 7 game series. The Yankees seem to be in good shape, but the team that I am really interested in is the Minnesota Twins. They have a great balance of pitching and hitting and have been playing out of their minds since the all-star break. I look for them to stun the American League and make it to the World Series.

In the National League, I've been drinking the Phillies kool-aid lately. Their pitching is as strong as ever, and the have found their hitting. Earlier in the season the Phillies lost a lot of games because of their poor hitting and ability to score runs. It seems like they have changed that, as they are on fire. The Phillies have 3 very very good starting pitchers, probably the best 1,2,3 punch in baseball. With Roy Halladay(looking to win the NL Cy Young) Cole Hamels and Roy Oswalt(who's turned his season around since being traded by the Astro's) its gonna be tough to win a series when you face these guys on consecutive nights. I expect the Phillies to make it to the World Series again and I expect them to win it all. After all, I did pick them to win it all at the beginning of the year.