End of the Season! Woo!

This one is for Joe, who I'm pretty sure is one of two people who actually reads this. (Hey Joe! Hey Lynn -- sorry this won't be more interesting for you.) I felt inspired this morning to write about the end of the baseball season. So here I go:

The End of the Baseball Season

I've actually been a bit negligent of the baseball season this year, because I have a non-baseball-fan wife and both my teams (the Cardinals and Twins) stink. So this morning I gave the latest news a good thorough look and felt a bit bad about all that I had missed.

Of course, there were lots of upsets and ... uh ... downsets(?) this year. The long-suffering Phillies overtook the occasionally-suffering Mets on the last day of the season. Meanwhile, Joe right now is no doubt mentally (and perhaps spiritually, physically, and molecularly -- I don't really know what he goes through) preparing for the Padres' one-game playoff with the Rockies, which will determine the fate of their season. And of course, the Cubs won, the Cubs won ....

But that's not even what I'm really talking about. Pennant races are nice and all, but what got me going this morning were a few matters of stark, lifeless accounting. I'm talkin' stats. Cuz I've always loved the games, but I've always loved the stats even more, if that's possible.

Two records that I've come to know and love and cherish and stroke lovingly and perhaps slightly inappropriately both changed hands this season. I was a bit surprised to see them go, and yes, a bit cheated to realize I didn't know about them earlier.

One was the record for strikeouts in a season. I had actually seen about a week ago that Ryan Howard was on the cusp of breaking this long-standing record that stretches all the way back to the summer of 2004. I remember 2004 well; it was a crazy time. Perhaps we'll never see the like again. George W. Bush was president, and he had led us into an intractable local conflict with no clear strategy for securing the peace. The country was abuzz over the misadventures of young chanteuse Britney Spears. Everyone, everywhere, was eating bagels and enjoying them.

2004 may seem like another lifetime, but there was a similar feeling in the air, since a major-league baseball player struck out more often in a season than any other player ever had. In that year, Adam Dunn unapologetically broke Bobby Bonds' 34-year old record for strikeouts in a season. "Unapologetically" is key, because several players had come close before, only to spin around, run away, and hide like pit bulls frightened of their own shadows.

It was worse than that feeble analogy, even, because these players had shown such a singular, epochal ability to strike out, and yet when they were on the brink of immortality, they sat out. It was like watching Picasso fake a hand injury so he could sit and watch TV instead of paint. Yes, I'm talking to you, Preston Wilson and Jose Hernandez. You know you could have broken the record and you sat out at the end of the season to avoid doing so. For shame!

But not Adam Dunn. He kept swingin' and missin', swingin' and missin', even long after the games were meaningless. And now Ryan Howard eclipsed even his mighty mark, coming oh-so-close to starting a brand-new one-person club (namely, the 200-SO club), by logging 199 strikeouts.

That's a lot of strikeouts, ladies and ... well, just Joe, I suppose. That's a lot of strikeouts, Joe. As my friend Joe likes to say, if you laid all those strikeouts end to end, they would reach to the moon and back a full 199 times! (Strikeouts are very tall.)

But there was another record that fell this year, and I had no prior warning, no memos, no APBs -- no idea that it was in even in danger. It had been held for 27 years, and had a unreachable height for leadoff hitters who play a lot and don't walk much.

What was that record? Who set it? Do you give a shit? Find out on the next edition of the World Wide Web Log of Pointless Ramblings, coming to your computer screen ... whenever I get around to it!