When life gives you lemons, stop giving free agent closers big contracts

The Hornet: The bane of the Beach family in the late '70s...and the Blue Jays today. Photo from this site.

Ex-Red Sox reliever Alan Embree made a bit of baseball history Tuesday, when he earned the victory for the Rockies despite not throwing a pitch. Embree picked off Austin Kearns to end the top of the eighth and the Rockies broke a 4-4 tie in the bottom of the inning and won 5-4.

Embree is only the second pitcher since 1990 to win a game in which he did not throw a pitch and the first since B.J. Ryan, who pulled off the feat in 2003. Ironically, in that it’s not ironic at all, Ryan was in the news himself less than 24 hours later, when the Blue Jays released their Opening Day closer even though he’s got a year-and-a-half and $15 million left on his contract.

Ryan’s release is a fascinating case study in baseball perceptions and realities. The perception is that the Jays wasted $15 million with Wednesday’s transaction. Toronto Star columnist Richard Griffin goes so far as to write that Ryan’s release reflects so badly on Jays GM J.P. Ricciardi that it may hasten his own dismissal.

But the Jays had nothing to gain, financially or otherwise, by holding on to Ryan. Sure, it would make the organization look a little better if Ryan was able to regain some semblance of effectiveness for the remainder of the deal. Yet even if Ryan somehow recaptured his job as Jays closer next year, he still would have spent nearly half of his five-year deal—all of 2007, which he missed due to Tommy John surgery, and most of this year—not closing. If Ricciardi is to be judged on this deal, the verdict was already in: Flop.

In addition, whether he was awesome or awful in a Toronto uniform, that money—and every cent of the $47 million the Jays agreed to pay him over five years following the 2005 season—was gone the second Ryan put pen to paper. He won’t pitch for the Jays next season, but the $10 million he’ll receive will still count against the Jays’ budget.

Baseball contracts are like new cars: Once you make the purchase, there are no refunds, even though the vehicle begins to depreciate the moment its new owner puts the key into the ignition.

The player-as-a-car analogy is particularly appropriate for relief pitchers, who, as noted in last week’s appreciation of Mariano Rivera’s 500th career save, are more prone than most to overnight transformations into lemons. (Much like my parents’ old Hornet, which terrorized our family for a couple years in the late ‘70s and still makes my father mutter curse words under his breath, but I digress)

To invest long-term in a closer if he’s perceived as the last piece to a championship puzzle would appear to be a risk worth taking, except history suggests an imported closer almost never makes the difference between euphoria and disappointment. Only one World Series champion in the last 25 years has featured a closer it signed the winter before: The 2004 Red Sox. And you may recall that Keith Foulke—whom the Sox signed to a reasonable three-year deal worth just shy of $21 million prior to 2004—did a bang-up impersonation of a lemon for the subsequent two seasons.

On the same day that the Jays made Ryan the richest closer ever, the Mets made Billy Wagner the second-richest closer. The Mets got a little better return on their investment than the Jays, who recorded winning seasons in each of the last three years but never sniffed the playoffs, yet the end result was the same: More Tommy John surgeries than championships.

The Mets made it to Game Seven of the NLCS in 2006 and Wagner provided two-and-a-half pretty good years before his elbow began throbbing last summer. He underwent Tommy John surgery last September and will likely miss the entire 2009 season.

The Ryan and Wagner deals did more to drag down the market for free agent closers than the toxic economy. Francisco Rodriguez ended last season with 208 saves at just 26 years old and reportedly harbored hopes of a five-year, $75 million deal, but his lone offer was from the Mets at three years and $37 million. So the Mets are paying nearly $20 million this season to two pitchers whose entire job description is to get three outs. Wonder no more why they’re destined for fourth place.

And Brad Lidge, who converted all 48 save opportunities—41 in the regular season and seven in the playoffs—last season for the world champion Phillies, signed a three-year extension worth $37.5 million last season instead of testing the free agent waters.

All of which means Francisco Cordero’s status as the richest free agent closer ever (at least in terms of average annual salary) is pretty safe, and that the Reds should be getting nervous right about now. Cordero signed a four-year deal worth $46 million after the 2007 season and has 55 saves and a 2.79 ERA in 108 appearances for a team that is 16 games under .500 since his arrival.

Not all long-term deals for closers end badly. Rivera is in the midst of his third extension with the Yankees—this one a three-year deal worth $45 million that takes him through the end of 2010—and as someone who has penned more than one “Rivera is not what he used to be” pieces, let me say, I’m an idiot and he looks like he’ll be just as brilliant for the duration of this contract as he was the previous two.

It’s too early to declare Joe Nathan’s deal with the Twins—he was re-signed last year to a four-year, $47 million contract that takes him through 2011—a successful one, but his dominance with Minnesota (221 saves, a 1.78 ERA and a 0.92 WHIP since 2004) indicates he could follow the Rivera path as someone who becomes a closer in his late 20s and thrives throughout his 30s.

The moral of the story? If you’re going to go long-term with a closer, better to re-sign your own—better to keep investing in the family’s well-worn yet reliable used car, because you know what’s gone on under the hood. The car on someone else’s lot might look shinier and flashier, but who knows what havoc is bubbling beneath the surface?

It’ll be interesting to see if the Sox prefer to reinvest in Jonathan Papelbon, who will be eligible for free agency after the 2011 season, and if the market by then is conducive to Papelbon becoming the highest-paid closer ever. If that’s Papelbon’s goal, as he has alluded to previously, you can be pretty sure the Blue Jays won’t be the team to make his dreams come true.

Email Jerry at jbeach73@gmail.com.

Wakefield's a worthy All-Star Cinderella, but a starter? That's madness

Tim Wakefield is waving hello to the All-Star Game for the first time. Photo from this site.

I’m a sucker for a good NCAA Tournament analogy, or even one that may not be all that good, so I’m figuring that when it comes to the All-Star Game, Tim Wakefield is the 17-12 BCS school to David Aardsma’s 28-4 mid-major.

Of course, this is just the All-Star Game, which provides a diversion for three days in the middle of July, and not March Madness, which allows overworked, underappreciated worker bees to stick it to the man for two glorious weeks, adds billions of illegal dollars to the American economy and generally gives us a reason to live as we count down the hours to Opening Day.

And Wakefield’s inclusion on the American League roster over the deserving likes of Aardsma (who converted 17 of his first 18 save chances with an ERA below 2.00) and others is merely fodder for barroom arguments (virtual and actual) and not borderline criminal, a la the annual screwing of the little guy to get the Big East or the Pac-10 yet another damn at-large bid.

Unlike Arizona, which has made the NCAA Tournament every year since the dawn of time, it’s impossible not to be happy for Wakefield, who earned his first All-Star Game berth in his 22nd professional season. But like Arizona, which responded to the criticism of its at-large bid in March by becoming the lowest-seeded team to reach the Sweet Sixteen, Wakefield did his part to silence any naysayers (heh, I always knew he’d make the team) last night by recording his AL-best 11th win and whiffing a season-high eight in leading the Sox past the Athletics, 5-4.

Aardsma, meanwhile, did a bang-up impersonation Wednesday of a mid-major who responds to an NCAA snub by getting smoked in the first round of the NIT: In his first appearance since the All-Star squads were announced, Aardsma was tattooed for four runs (three earned) without recording an out as he blew a three-run lead and took the defeat in the Mariners’ 5-3 loss to the Orioles.

Wakefield still wouldn’t be my choice as one of the eight best starting pitchers in the league, but he did produce a pretty impressive final kick in the weeks leading up to the All-Star selections (2-0 with a 3.04 ERA and a 14/2 K/BB ratio in his last four starts) and has improved his standing in most statistical categories. In addition to leading the league in wins, he’s tied for 24th in ERA (4.14) and tied for 25th in WHIP (1.38). He’s also increased his K/BB ratio from 1.34 to 1.65.

That said, SportsCenter grouping him in Wednesday night with Zack Greinke and Roy Halladay as candidates to start for the American League in St. Louis is lunacy. All three hurlers would be able to make the start on five or more days of rest, but Greinke and Halladay each rank among the top five in all three pitching Triple Crown categories and would be far more deserving of the start—whether in recognition of a remarkable comeback from the depression that threatened to Greinke’s career or, in Halladay’s case, as a nod to an impressive, nearly decade-long body of work.

Wakefield’s inclusion on the team is perfectly fine and a cool acknowledgment of a career defined by equal parts durability, perseverance and quiet nobility. Still, as an at-large honoree, he’s not quite the 1986 LSU Tigers, either.

Email Jerry at jbeach73@gmail.com.

Fighting Words Q&A: Lou Merloni

Lou Merloni, right, remains close friends with ex-Sox superstar Nomar Garciaparra. Photo from this site.

I was fortunate enough to land most of the interviews I wanted in the writing of Fighting Words, but there were a few who got away—most notably Nomar Garciaparra, the shy and withdrawn franchise icon who had a strained relationship with the press before he was shockingly traded by the Red Sox five years ago this month.

I was hoping to catch Garciaparra in Washington or Pittsburgh when the Cubs made trips there in May 2005, but those plans were snuffed out when Garciaparra suffered a gruesome groin injury in April that sidelined him until August. Subsequent attempts to speak to him via various intermediaries were unsuccessful.

I relied on various conversations with reporters as well as Garciaparra’s friends and ex-teammates in (hopefully) painting a balanced picture of Garciaparra’s complicated relationship with the press. You be the judge in Fighting Words, out now! (shameless plug over)

One of the most helpful people to talk to about Garciaparra was Lou Merloni, the utility infielder and Framingham native who was considered Garciaparra’s closest confidant on the Sox. This interview was conducted during the 2005-06 winter, during which Merloni—who worked for NESN last year and is now with Comcast New England—was with the Indians. With Garciaparra and the Athletics completing their series against the Sox tonight, I thought it was an appropriate time to unveil this Q&A.


What was your viewpoint of the media during your time with the Red Sox and specifically the attention surrounding the Sox’ pursuit of a championship?

The six years I was there, from ’98 to ’03, you could just see it progressively growing. We lost in the ALCS a couple times while I was there—obviously, 2003 was very intense, being in a Game Seven and all—but you could see it every year that we were just getting close enough. We had a good team, but it wasn’t good enough. It doesn’t matter if you win 100 games, you need to win the World Series. And that was just coming to a head. That team, going through that in ’04, put that behind them.

You could just see it. The pressure was kind of coming down in the clubhouse. Here we are, in the playoffs reading reasons why we can’t win compared to other teams. It was tough to see, and I think it started to filter into the clubhouse.

Did you sense any tensions between the team and the press?

No, I really don’t think that. It seemed to me that it was just starting to come to a head [with] Jimy Williams. I think everybody in that clubhouse really liked him. He really got hit pretty hard by the media and the fans. Grady Little, too. I think from the time I was there in ’98, ’99, it was calm. The core of the young team was coming together, everyone was excited about the future. What happened is that core finally came together two or three years later and it was time to win. Pedro’s contract was running out. Nomar, Varitek, Derek Lowe—the core of this ballclub’s contracts were running out and it was time to win. And that sense of urgency had taken over, intensity-wise in the media and the clubhouse, and everybody started to feel the heat.

Dan Duquette had a strained relationship with the press. Did you ever sense that filtering into the clubhouse and did you have any observations on Duquette’s interactions with the press?

If you’re a shy guy and a quiet guy—now you’re in the big leagues expected to be a spokesperson and outgoing. Dan wasn’t a very good communicator. He was very to himself and didn’t give you a lot, and I think the media, out of a GM, they want more than that, to know the reasons why you made this deal. And once again, that just wasn’t Dan Duquette. He wasn’t a very outgoing [person]. Having that type of job in that type of city, I think you need to give people a little bit more than that.

Manny Delcarmen, who grew up just outside of Boston, said he felt the media was supportive of him [as a rookie in 2005]. Did you sense the media was more supportive of you because you were a local native?

Absolutely. When I first came up it was great—supportive of Framingham, the local guy, got a local guy on our team. And it was outstanding. As a player, though, you need to realize one of the tough parts about playing at home is everything is just kind of blown up. Everything is doubled for us as local guys. When you’re doing bad and when you’re struggling, it’s doubly worse because the fact that everybody is reading about it, reading this columnist’s opinionated article about how bad you are. ‘I don’t care what town he’s from, get him out of here’—that hits home very hard, because family and friends are reading about it. It’s not easy.

Were you comfortable serving as a team spokesman type?

I think in time, I learned my lesson. My first couple years, getting sent up and down, they might have caught me at the wrong times. That’s the tough part, when I got sent down. I wasn’t too happy about it, the cameras [are] at your locker, sometimes you need a minute to calm down there a little bit. But unfortunately I didn’t do that, I said some things that made people [say] ‘Stop your crying.’ And I took that in stride. I can deal with that. I learned my lesson from it. I think, over the years, I got a lot more comfortable with what to say and what not to say. Unfortunately, I think sometimes you just really can’t speak your mind. You have to tae a second, take a moment to say the right thing. And I think that’s something that you learn in time. I feel comfortable with that.

Is it essential for a team like the Red Sox to have a handful of players who are comfortable with the press and can shield others from it?

When I came up my first year, that’s what made Mo Vaughn so valuable. He took it all. If the media was cornering a player—a younger player—he would step in and answer the questions. He took that heat off guys. Took all that media attention, put it on to himself. He felt like he could handle it. There’s a lot of value in guys like that, like Millar and Damon, that took the heat off, that did the talking.

At the same point, the responsibility comes with that. Talking to Kevin now that he’s out of there, there’s a sense of relief, [of] ‘maybe I shouldn’t have put myself out so much.’ You open the door now for the criticism. When you’re going good, everything is great. The minute you start to struggle, it’s what you’ve created: ‘I talked so much, now comes this spotlight’ and people come to you for answers. It can be difficult, handling the media in Boston. The best way [was] Bill Mueller—he kind of came in, did his job and left. People don’t even realize what he accomplished there. That would probably be the best way to approach it.

You're good friends with Nomar Garciaparra. What were his thoughts on the press and was he uncomfortable with life as a public figure?

His first year in the league, he didn’t do much talking at all, didn’t like talking to the media. He was a quiet guy [with] Mo taking all the heat off him. [When Vaughn left, it was his turn now to be that guy and his personality isn’t one that wants to speak and put [himself] out there. His personality wasn’t like a Kevin Millar or Johnny Damon—very outgoing. And he paid the price for it. Kevin Millar, basically everybody loved him and loved every word out of his mouth. Everyone telling him to shut up. So you’ve got to find that happy medium, I guess.

I think you go back to the type of person you are before you get there. [Nomar was a] very family-oriented guy, very private, tried to keep the private in his life, and he turned into the type of player in Boston, because of his accomplishments, where everybody wanted to know everything they could about him because he was a superstar. People are trying to get into his life—‘What’s it like being you? What is this like?’—and he just wasn’t willing to give any of that up. It got to the point where if you wanted to ask him about the game tonight, [he’d] do that.

Then he started this whole thing with [future wife] Mia Hamm, and that really got a lot of attention into his personal life, [reporters] coming up to his locker and asking about his relationship with her. And he really closed himself off and became very negative. And he brought some of it upon himself, he’ll admit it, but at the same point, he just didn’t want to talk about things. And that’s his personality.

He had a tough time dealing with everything. Now that you’re a superstar, everyone expected you to let them into your world. And not everybody is like that.

How did you think Nomar was treated after his trade in 2004?

What went on afterward—whoever went on a tangent about him those two months afterward should just be embarrassed. Obviously, we’re good friends, and reading stuff like that, I think he was definitely treated unfairly. Rather than take a step back and say thank you for the years [and] you probably will be the best shortstop to ever come thru and wear a Boston Red Sox uniform, everyone jumped on the bandwagon and bashed him. I do think there were some people out there who appreciated his professionalism and how he wanted to handle it, even those people who wanted him to give more.

But at the same time, a lot of people stabbed him in the back. His job is to go out and play as hard as he can. A lot of people did appreciate him. Some o the people that really bashed him and jumped on the bandwagon have got to take a look at themselves and see what they wrote.

Email Jerry at jbeach73@gmail.com.

Blue morning, Blue Jays

Roy Halladay may not have much longer to wear the coolest retro uniforms in baseball. Photo from this site.

After watching the Red Sox play the Orioles in Fenway Park at Camden Yards last week, I was tempted to write an entry about how I feel bad for the Orioles, who seem to finally have a clue yet are stuck in the most loaded division in baseball.

A week after our return from Baltimore, I’ve decided I feel almost as sorry for the Blue Jays.

You remember the Blue Jays, right? Were soaring high atop the AL East for most of the season’s first two months? On pace for 100 wins? Doing it all with a powerful offense and a pitching staff held together by duct tape and thumbtacks?

That spate of injuries was just one reason the Jays’ run was a smoke and mirrors concoction unlikely to last six months. Still, though, their descent has been a rapid one: After tonight’s 3-1 loss to the Rays, the Jays are 43-42, in fourth place in the division and closer to last place (six games ahead of the Orioles) than first (eight games behind the Sox).

Since going a season-high 13 games over .500 and taking a season-best 3 ½-game lead on May 18, the Jays are a cringe-worthy 16-28. In addition, the Jays are just 8-15 against the AL East, the worst mark in the division.

The Jays are also facing an uncertain future at the corporate level, which is why ace Roy Halladay may be in his final weeks in a Toronto uniform. The Jays had a healthy payroll the last several seasons under owner Ted Rogers, but it never translated into a playoff berth and Rogers died in December. The Jays’ payroll this year is just over $80 million, nearly $20 million less than it was in 2008, and beginning in 2011, they’ve got $40 million locked up in just three players—MVP candidate Aaron Hill and the underwhelming duo of Vernon Wells and Alex Rios.

The Jays have proven to have plenty of young pitching this season, and with six regular position players over the age of 30, they could hasten the rebuilding process by getting a sizable return on Halladay, who is quite the bargain—by baseball standards, anyway—at $15 million for next season, the last year of his contract.

Still, even if the Jays get plenty for Halladay and maintain an AL East-caliber payroll, there’s no guarantee they’ll hurdle the various other obstacles standing between the franchise and a return to the playoffs. The Jays were baseball’s model franchise in the early 1990s, shattering attendance records at baseball’s finest ballpark and winning consecutive World Series in 1992-93.

Sky Dome was rendered a dinosaur by Camden Yards, but the Jays have been competitive in recent years: They’re one of only four AL teams to post a winning record in each of the preceding three seasons. Yet they haven’t been to the playoffs since 1993, a streak surpassed in the AL only by the perennially woebegone Royals.

The other three teams to finish better than .500 each of the previous three years, meanwhile, have all been to the playoffs twice in that span: The Red Sox, Yankees and Angels. With the Jays nose-diving and Halladay likely on the block, Toronto seems doomed to another few years of being associated with the Royals rather than American League royalty.

Email Jerry at jbeach73@gmail.com.

Of Bates, Bailey and Brown…and Buchholz’ not-so-short-stop at Pawtucket

It's been a good month for longtime Red Sox prospects Dusty Brown and Aaron Bates. Photo from this site.

Maybe Clay Buchholz should have remained a shortstop. Buchholz continues to pine away on the farm despite posting ace-caliber numbers for Triple-A Pawtucket, though it will be interesting to see what happens if John Smoltz, who struggled for the second time in three starts in a 6-0 loss to the Athletics Monday, is ineffective again against the Royals this weekend.

Meanwhile, it remains a good month for the Sox’ second-tier position prospects. Dusty Brown, a 2000 draftee, earned his first recall June 21 but did not record an at-bat in four days with the Sox. Aaron Bates won’t have to worry about heading back to the minors before he steps to a big league plate: Bates was promoted to the Sox last night to replace the injured Jeff Bailey and went 0-for-3 as the Sox’ first baseman.

That the Sox have called up Bates and Bailey, in particular, points to their thoroughness and resourcefulness on the farm.

Bailey was signed as a minor league free agent by the Sox following the 2003 season, at which point he was a displaced catcher with all of 24 Triple-A at-bats on his resume. Non-prospects who are in their mid-to-late 20s, limited to first base or a corner outfield position and lacking a spot on the 40-man roster are the type of players who are usually ignored by the parent club no matter how well they fare, and it seemed as if Bailey was consigned to 4-A status when he performed well for Portland and Pawtucket for the next three-and-a-half seasons. But the Sox recalled him for three games prior to the All-Star Break in 2007 and he earned another cup of coffee last year before spending more than a month this season with the Sox in a reserve role.

Bates was a third-round pick in 2006 who surged into Double-A a little more than a year after he was drafted, but he stalled there and was surpassed—on the organizational totem pole, if not on the actual minor league ladder—by fellow ’06 draftee Lars Anderson. And with Anderson at Portland this season, the Sox moved Bates to left field, where his defense was a work in progress when my wife and I saw him misplay a ball against Binghamton in upstate New York in mid-April.

But Bates hit .340 with 39 RBI and 20 extra-base hits in 206 at-bats for the Sea Dogs to earn a promotion to Pawtucket, where he was hitting .182 in 88 at-bats when Bailey’s injury created his big league opportunity.

Bates is one of three 2006 draftees currently with the Sox, a pretty impressive haul for a class that is not held in as high regard as the 2005 batch and one with several notable players (Anderson, Jason Place, Caleb Clay and Josh Reddick, to name a few) still in the developmental phase and still viewed as potential big leaguers.

It’s probably little consolation to Buchholz, but these things are as much a matter of good timing as anything else. Bailey and Brown got their initial call-ups when the sox wanted depth as Youkilis and Jason Varitek, respectively, battled nagging injuries. And Bates needed 754 at-bats at Double-A to earn the promotion to Triple-A but just 88 at-bats at Pawtucket before he received a ticket to Boston.

Good timing. If I’m Buchholz, I start taking grounders at short again, just in case.

Email Jerry at jbeach73@gmail.com.

Forget Mauer and Pujols, keep your eye on Ichiro this summer

I've got a feeling Ichiro has .400 in his sights. Photo from this site.

With his first pitch to Ichiro Suzuki tonight, Tim Wakefield will become the Red Sox’ all-time leader in games started, as Joel Sherman noted in this interesting piece he penned earlier this week for SI.com. As remarkable a feat as that is for someone the Sox rescued off the scrap heap 14 years ago, I was tempted to write how it pales in comparison to the history that could be set this season as Suzuki pursues the magical .400 mark.

Then I did the math, and my first thought was to no longer wonder why most people are more focused on Joe Mauer’s pursuit of .400 or Albert Pujols’ flirtation with the Triple Crown.

Then I pondered it some more, and I decided to say screw it, that Suzuki is going to make a more serious run at .400 than Mauer will at .400 and Pujols will at the Triple Crown, even if Suzuki’s path to history appears more treacherous.

Mauer, who entered Friday hitting .392, missed the first month of the season, which both lessens and boosts his chances of reaching .400. He can’t afford another stint on the disabled list nor an extended slump. And as a catcher, the chances are he’s going to incur the types of bumps and bruises that put a drain on his bat.

That said, the math doesn’t lie: A player’s chances of hitting .400 decrease with every plate appearance. George Brett believes missing a month of the 1980 season was one of the biggest reasons he made such a serious run at .400 before he finished at .390.

Pujols is once again lapping the field in the NL MVP race and leads the circuit in homers (30, six more than the Padres’ Adrian Gonzalez) and RBI (77, two more than the Brewers’ Prince Fielder) while ranking fourth in batting average (.335, .013 behind the Marlins’ Hanley Ramirez). But will the rest of the mediocre Cardinals—Pujols is the only St. Louis player with an average above .300, an on-base percentage above .355 and a slugging percentage above .455—eventually make it impossible for Pujols to fend off Fielder in RBI?

Suzuki, meanwhile, is in the midst of one of his patented red-hot midseason runs. The career .349 hitter from May through July is hitting .386 since May 1 of this season and hit a robust .407 in June. He’s batting .370 overall, easily the best in baseball (at least until Mauer qualifies for the batting crown).

The problem would seem to be that maintaining a .407 average the rest of this season would leave Suzuki “only” at .389. Assuming Suzuki gets as many at-bats (108) per month the rest of the season as he did in June, he’d have to hit an eye-popping .432 (140-for-324) to finish at .401. Actually, he could go a mere 139-for-324 and finish at .3996, which rounds up to .400, but if Ted Williams—the last .400 hitter—wasn’t willing to sit on .3995 with two games left to play, damnit, we’re not accepting it from anyone else.

Anyway, hitting .432 for more than half a season sounds impossible. Except Suzuki has already basically done it once. He hit an insane .429 after the All-Star Break in 2005, the season in which he racked up a record 262 hits.

And he’s pretty good at doing the impossible more than once. In a column today, ESPN.com’s Jayson Stark noted that, through Tuesday, Suzuki had at least one hit in 53 of his last 56 games. Only three players (including Johnny Damon in 2005, when he fashioned a 29-game hitting streak) have had such a streak since Joe DiMaggio’s record 56-game hitting streak in 1941, and Suzuki is the only one who has done it twice. TWICE.

The only other player to ever accomplish that? That’s right: DiMaggio.

So why can’t Suzuki hit .432 the rest of the season and produce another streak similar to (or better than) his 53-in-56 run? The guy is as pure a hitter as the game has ever seen. He legs out plenty of infield singles. He’s racing towards his record ninth straight 200-hit season in as many big league seasons, will surge past 2,000 hits this summer and has to be taken as a legitimate candidate to reach 3,000 hits even though he turns 36 in October.

Also aiding Suzuki’s quest is the Mariners’ surprising competitiveness as well as…hmm, how shall we put this…his intense interest in his numbers. Even if he’s not as selfish as he has been portrayed, he seems to like his stats. That’s a human reaction shared by about 98 percent of his peers, but not a politically correct one. And I bet it makes things really interesting come the middle of September, when the guess here is Suzuki is answering a whole lot more questions about an individual pursuit than either Mauer or Pujols.

Email Jerry at jbeach73@gmail.com.

O No

I’ve got an incredible knack for being at a ballpark the day before it hosts history. On May 16, 1998, my future wife and I went to the Yankees-Twins game at Yankee Stadium. This happened the next day.

On July 17, 1999, I covered a Yankees-Expos game, also at Yankee Stadium. This happened the next day.

On Monday, my wife and I took an anniversary trip to Fenway Park at Camden Yards to see the Sox host the Orioles. Then this happened last night.

Orioles 11, Red Sox 10 is the type of game that destroys a manager’s insides, if not shortens his career. Remember last night the next time Jason Varitek is catching the late innings of a blowout. You cannot blame Terry Francona, at all, for pulling Varitek in the seventh inning with the Sox throttling the Orioles 10-1. It’s not George Kottaras’ fault the Sox lost, but he didn’t exactly help matters by getting thrown out at the plate in the eighth inning and I imagine it’ll be a long time before Francona sends in the “B” squad in a lopsided game.

I don’t always miss history, though, as I realized while watching the postgame with my Dad, who was saying he thought Justin Masterson should have gotten the loss instead of Takashi Saito. I think my Dad was just ticked off about the loss and not really wondering why Masterson wasn’t on the hook for the “L” despite leaving with a 10-6 lead, but it reminded me of a Mets-Braves game I covered in 2000 in which the Mets scored 10 runs in the eighth inning, including nine with two outs, to shock the Braves, 11-8.

Almost as shocking was the decision of the official scorer to enforce the little-used rule that allows him to choose as the winning pitcher the hurler he deemed most effective, not the one who was the pitcher of record when the Mets took the lead. And so the win was awarded to Armando Benitez, who allowed two baserunners but no runs in a save situation in the ninth, instead of Eric Cammack, who allowed three runs in the eighth. And how’s this for a cruel twist of fate: Cammack never won a big league game.

In talking about the second-biggest comeback in Mets history mere minutes after the Orioles capped their largest comeback ever, I realized the Mets-Braves game occurred at the very end of June—almost certainly June 30.

(Don’t ask me why I can remember stuff like this, as well as remember that I graduated high school 18 years ago yesterday, but cannot remember to do the dishes)

A couple clicks on the Internet confirmed that the Mets did indeed beat the Braves 11-8 on June 30, 2000. How awesome is that? Two epic comebacks by perpetual underdogs against baseball royalty separated by exactly nine years. I only wish it was John Smoltz who started for the Braves against the Mets, not Kevin Millwood.

I’m sure the Sox would prefer it if the short- and long-term similarities to the Mets-Braves game in 2000 ended with the final pitch of last night’s contest. Just like the Sox will send Josh Beckett to the mound for a 1 p.m. start today, the Braves had Greg Maddux ready to start a matinee nine years ago. But the Mets hammered Maddux for seven runs in just two innings in a 9-1 win.

I remember writing the Mets declared their arrival as an elite team and forever weakened the Braves with their comeback win. There’s no worries about the Orioles traveling much further north in the AL East standings this year, and these Sox have a history of resourcefulness that should earn them the benefit of the doubt when wondering how they’ll react to the second-biggest single game collapse in team history.

But while I was a little hyperbolic back then—OK, a lot—I was also right, at least in terms of the bottom line: The Mets made the World Series that year while the Braves were swept out of the NL Division Series by the Cardinals.

Email Jerry at jbeach73@gmail.com.