Why Mess With a Good Thing?

Yost is giving Gordon the day off tonight.  Let me ask:  Would you do that in the middle of a 9-game hitting streak?  I don’t think I would.

Here’s the thing:  Yost wants to give each of his three outfielders a day off over the next 3 days.  He wants to sit Gordon tonight and let Maier play.  The other two will sit, one at a time, on Saturday and Sunday, and Dyson will play for them.

Here’s why I think this is a bad idea.  Tomorrow is a throwaway game anyway.  I don’t care how bad the M’s offense is.  O’Sullivan is going to make them look like the frickin’ ’61 Yankees.  It’s OK—we all know we don’t have a 5^th starter.  We don’t really have a 4^th starter, to be honest.  Any kind of wins we can pull with Steaming Pile Davies and Survivor’s Russell Hantz—er—Sean O’Sullivan on the mound are complete accidents.  O’Sullivan starts are PERFECT opportunities to rest your stars (or at least the players who qualify as “stars” for the Royals.  It’s relative).

So knowing we’re going to lose tomorrow, and understanding that there’s still going to be a relatively large Saturday crowd, regardless of who’s playing (it is replica road jersey night, after all), then Friday night’s game becomes a must-win for the series.  You don’t want to head into Sunday down 1-2 against the worst team in baseball.  Failing to win the series with the M’s could be the first momentum killer that sends the 2011 Royals into the tailspin we all assume is going to come, sooner or later.

I’d like to delay that as long as possible, please.  As my good buddy, Greg, texted me yesterday, “It’s so nice not to be out of it on Tax Day.”

BY THE WAY….Really quick here on Ichiro, since the M’s are in town.  I’ve always sort of had a bit of a small man-crush on Ichiro.  I’ve MOSTLY transferred that over to Alcides Escobar’s glove (you can only have so many baseball man-crushes going on at the same time, and I’ve seemingly-foolishly held onto my one for Alex Gordon too long to let it go now that it’s starting to look less foolish).  But I still appreciate Ichiro’s game.

Now, for a lead-off guy, Ichiro doesn’t get on base or score runs at a shockingly-high rate.  But he’s going to get into the Hall of Fame because he plays an historically good defensive outfield, and he’s historically unique (one of a kind) and gathering hits.  I keep expecting the wheels to fall off at some point.  I expect something to happen that affects his speed to the point where he goes from 200+ hits in a year to 150 the next.  I thought maybe 2009 was the year, when he opened the season on the DL.  But it didn’t happen.  Before yesterday’s game, he was hitting about .240, so I thought maybe he was slowing down.  He didn’t look slow yesterday, by golly.  There aren’t more than 3 or 4 players in the HISTORY of baseball that were going to beat out that amazing play that Escobar (man-crush) made up the middle.  But Ichiro was safe.

If he does manage to get to 200 hits this year, he will become not only the first person to get 200 in each of his first 11 seasons, or the first person to have 11 200-hit seasons in a row, but he becomes the first person to have 11 200-hit seasons PERIOD.

The only thing to wonder about Ichiro now is whether he’ll play long enough to get his 3,000^th Major League hit.  He’ll almost certainly fly past 2,400 this year, MAYBE approach get within 30 or so of 2,500.  But he’s 37, coming up on 38.  Again, the wheels are gonna fall of some time, and it’s difficult for me to imagine him hanging around long after he becomes an “average” fielder or hitter.  And he’s an OLD 37—his rookie year in the States was his 9^th year of professional baseball.

Now, I’m NOT one of those who spends a lot of time thinking about his hits in Japan and combining them with his MLB hits, or any of that nonsense.  After all, Japanese baseball is AAA level, at best.  And they play a shorter season, so there’s not an apples-to-apples comparison anyway. 

But I do lament the fact that he WASN’T playing in the States those 8 years, for the simple reason that I’d like to see SOMEBODY knock Pete Rose off the all-time hits chart.  I think Ichiro would have done it if he comes into the majors at 20 or 21 in stead of 27 or 28.

I mean, in 8 years in Japan, he averaged about 122 games a year and about 160 hits a year.  I don’t see any reason why he wouldn’t have averaged AT LEAST 175 a year over that time in the States—longer schedule, for one, and he’s averaged some 220 for the 10 years he’s been here.  At that kind of a number, Ichiro would be sitting somewhere in the neighborhood of 3,800 hits as I sit and type this.

That’s a mere 400-500 short of Rose.  Even with BAD Ichiro seasons, he would easily blow past the record by the time he turns 40, and could conceivably put it so far out of reach that no one would ever think of approaching it.

But as it is, we have to appreciate Ichiro for the time we had him with us, and continue to marvel at the best hit “creator” of all time.