Robinson Cano vs. Mark Reynolds

Somewhere, somebody had to have had money on it, right?

What was going to happen first...Robinson Cano was going to collect his 100th hit of the season or Mark Reynolds was going to go down swinging for the 100th time?

Both are their respective league leaders in each category and both are, seemingly, looking to get to the 100 mark earlier than in previous years.

Last season, Cano didn't get his 100th hit until the Bronx Bombers' 82nd game...a July 6 contest against the Toronto Blue Jays. It was his 351st plate appearance.

He would finish the season third in the American League with 204.

The all-time leader in strikeouts in a season, Reynolds, hit the century mark last year on June 26. It was his 307th plate appearance and his team's 74th game of the season...coincidentally, an interleague affair against the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim.

Monday night, both entered the 2001 World Series rematch stuck at 99.

Cano has done little wrong this season. His .367 batting average entering Monday night's game is nearly 30 points higher than his closest competitor and on the mound for the Diamondbacks was a pitcher he had seen 21 times before...Rodrigo Lopez.

Head to head, Cano came in batting .286 lifetime against Lopez and in his fourth at bat, he would get the base knock he needed in the top of the eighth...his 302nd plate appearance of the year.

Across the diamond, the free swinging Reynolds had never faced Yankees starter A.J. Burnett, so it was unknown how the two would match up. After hitting a home run off the righty in the first, it was clear that the bullpen might have to come into to play.

First out of the pen was Chad Gaudin, a pitcher who has K'd Reynolds six times in eleven plate appearances...but the best he could do was walk the slugger.

In the bottom of the seventh, facing Chan Ho Park, the Diamondbacks third baseman struck out. And if you're keeping track, it was Reynolds' first ever strikeout against Park and his 282nd plate appearance of the season.

Now, I'm not sure what the payout would have been (we'll leave that up to the eggheads over at bodog.com), but if you picked Mark Reynolds...you won.

If you have either one on your fantasy team, odds are it is a different story.

Is this what passes for baseball these days?

One of the milestones that I have yet to expound upon in length is the setting of a new seasonal strikeout record.

Sure, I briefly mentioned it earlier in the week…but good friend of The Hall, E, has taken it about eighteen steps further.

Enjoy.

Mark Reynolds of the Arizona Diamondbacks has broken the old record of 204 strikeouts, set way back in...well, last year by Mark Reynolds.

At 208 Ks with nine games left, he appears poised to make it very difficult for himself to break this record again next year. And, while it was bound to happen, as every record is made to be broken, I think the strikeout record getting topped twice in as many years points towards a disturbing trend in baseball.

The seasonal strikeout record was held for a loooong time by Bobby Bonds. He broke the previous mark of 175 in 1969 with 187, and then broke his own record with 189 the following year.

189 was the record for close to 35 years!

Prior to the turn of the millennium, the closet anyone ever got to the record was when Rob Deer, who sometimes had twice as many strikeouts as hits in a season, got within three in 1987.

In fact, up until 1997, Dave Nicholson's old 1963 mark of 175 was only surpassed five other times, and two of those were Deer! No one wanted that record.

And rightly so, as it expresses a level of ineptitude that not many players want to achieve.

But, as we approached Y2K, a lot of players started closing in.

As the new millennium proceeded, someone (specifically, Adam Dunn) jerked around and managed to break that strikeout record. In just the past five years, it has been reset three more times…most recently by Reynolds.

More than thirty years, and the closest anyone got to Bonds' mark was within three. In the past six years, it's been topped seven times. That old 175 mark has been bested 19 more times in the past 10 years.

Apparently, it's all right to be a strikeout overachiever.

Funny thing, though…over that same 10-12 year time period, the same thing happened to home runs.

When Albert Belle hit 50 homers in 1995, that was the first time someone had done that since Cecil Fielder did it five years earlier. Prior to Fielder…George Foster in 1977.

In the first 126 years of baseball, 50 home runs in a season had happened only 17 times. Since '95, it's happened 21 more times. It's no big deal to hit 50, even 60, homers now.

Coincidentally enough, wasn't that same time period when the whole steroid thing kinda took off?

I'm sure someone could easily blame steroids for the rise in homers and strikeouts, but, seeing as there's little correlation between the home run and strikeout numbers, this assumption would lead one to believe that steroids grant the user one of two abilities: (1) hitting lots of homers, or (2) striking out an irrational number of times.

The easier conclusion to reach is that, because of the recent increased importance of the home run, batters aren't even attempting to put the ball in play anymore, opting to merely swing so hard that they corkscrew themselves into the ground like a Looney Tunes character every time they miss.
I think that, if more emphasis was placed on just making contact with the ball instead of trying to knock its cover off, strikeouts would go down.

Sure, homers would go down, too, but I'd rather watch someone get 200 hits than watch them not hit anything 200 times.

As for Reynolds and his dubious mark, he might want to focus more on contact and less on power.

The career strikeout mark is 2597, held by Reggie Jackson. Only four players (including Jackson) have topped 2000 Ks in their careers, and no one in the history of baseball has gotten within 250 of Jackson's record.

That being said, at his current place, Reynolds will break Jackson's record within 10 years…a mark it took Jackson 21 years to set, and this dope, in three season, is already a quarter of the way there.

No wonder I can barely be bothered to pay attention to baseball anymore.

"Do you want to hear something sick?"

The summer before I went away to college I went on a date to the local mall.

Romantic, right?

Thing is, I didn't go there because of the old stereotype "girls like to shop"...I went there solely because I needed to replace my worn out cassette (yes, cassette) of Pearl Jam's "Ten" with a new one.

Suffice it to say, my love affair with the Seattle-based rockers has lasted much longer than the result of that afternoon explaining the overlap of Green River, Mother Love Bone and Pearl Jam to a girl I shared space with in Spanish class.

And with their latest release "Backspacer", one can only be reminded of the consistency they've maintained since "Alive" first hit the airwaves in 1991. It is that same sort of consistency that has made Yankees closer Mariano Rivera an obvious shoe-in when his name comes up in Hall of Fame discussions.

Yes, I did just segue from Pearl Jam to Mariano Rivera.

Saturday night, I received the following tweet from Yankees jack of all trades Nick Swisher: "Congrats to Mo. 1000th career strikeout. Wow."

1000 career Ks...I had no clue. Immediately that led me to scrambling. I know Rivera is a stud, but how does he stack up to active counterpart Trevor Hoffman?

How about against Hall of Famers Dennis Eckersley, Goose Gossage, Bruce Sutter or friend of The Hall Rollie Fingers?

Of the six, only Hoffman and Sutter never started a game...Eckersley started 361. "Mo" started ten in his rookie campaign, and both Gossage and Fingers took the mound as the game's starter 37 times.

And, no, "Clerks" fans...not in a row.

I won't compare the save totals between the six since we're talking two VERY different periods of closers, but we can look compare their ERAs out of the bullpen.

Fingers (2.73), Hoffman (2.74), Gossage (2.77), Sutter (2.82) and Eckersley (2.85) are all pretty much cut from the same cloth when it comes to their ERA as a reliever. Rivera blows them all away with a career 2.09 ERA out of the bullpen. Matter of fact, dude even has the lowest career ERA (2.26) among relievers that have pitched at least 1000 innings.

In his saves (all American League leading 522 of them), Rivera's ERA continues to drops even more...to a staggering 0.64. The only member of the Hall of Fame with a better ERA in his saves is Gossage at 0.54.

"Do you want to hear something sick" Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder warbles as "Gonna See My Friend" kicks off their latest offering, so I am inclined to ask the same...do you?

Rivera has managed to save 85% of the games he's come in to close. By comparison...current reliever wunderkind Francisco Rodriguez is only at 77% so far in his young career. Odds are he won't touch Mo's consistency.

And since we're talking consistency (and earlier, strikeouts), the Majors did crown a new strikeout king...its old one.

That's right, Diamondbacks slugger Mark Reynolds struck out three times in a Tuesday night victory against the Giants.

Going into the night, Reynolds had 203 whiffs, one shy of his old record 204. With ten games to go in the season...it'll be interesting to see match his listed playing weight (220 pounds) with Ks.