![\"WhgbHlSq\"](\"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/wp-content\/WhgbHlSq.jpg\" "\\"WhgbHlSq\\"")
Thursday was a great day for European baseball.\u00c2\u00a0 Greg Halman took the field at the Rogers Centre for the Seattle Mariners and became the latest Dutchman to make the Major Leagues.\u00c2\u00a0 Halman was born in Haarlem and developed his game as a youngster in the Netherlands before taking his career Stateside.<\/p>\n
Halman went 0-for-4 in his debut, but it will still be an unforgettable experience for the player and the game will leave a trace in the baseball record books as well.<\/p>\n
Ichiro Suzuki went into the game against the Toronto Blue Jays with 198 hits on the season.\u00c2\u00a0 With Halman watching from the Mariners\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 dugout, Ichiro made it to 199 with a double in the third inning and then rounded it up to 200 with a single in the fifth (Halman led off both innings, striking out and grounding out).\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n
In doing so, Ichiro set a Major League record for consecutive seasons with 200 hits.\u00c2\u00a0 He\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s achieved the feat in all ten seasons since arriving in Seattle from Japan.\u00c2\u00a0 Only the \u00e2\u20ac\u02dchit king\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 Pete Rose can match Ichiro\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s ten 200-hit seasons and Rose\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s longest consecutive streak was three years (1968-1970).\u00c2\u00a0 Halman won\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t need to be told how lucky he is to be playing on the same team as such an extraordinary talent.<\/p>\n
He was also in prime position to watch another historic hit, albeit one which was not so welcome to the Mariners.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n
Jose Bautista hit his fiftieth home run of the season with two outs in the bottom of the first inning off Felix Hernandez.\u00c2\u00a0 It was one of only two hits that Hernandez gave up in the game and was the only run scored, so Bautista certainly didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t get to fifty in a cheap way.<\/p>\n
Bautista has joined an exclusive club, containing only twenty-six members from the history of the Majors, of players who have hit at least fifty long balls in a season<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s interesting to look at how the membership has grown since Babe Ruth created the club in 1920.\u00c2\u00a0 The feat was achieved just seventeen times between 1920 and 1977 and only once more between then and the 1995 season (Cecil Fielder, Prince\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s father, hit 51 in 1990).\u00c2\u00a0 However, Bautista\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s shot meant that it has happened twenty-four times in the last sixteen seasons.<\/p>\n The shadow of steroids will rear its ugly head as an explanation and it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s possible that they may have been a contributory factor in some cases. However you could also list any number of other factors that may have influenced this power-hitting phenomenon: the design of new ballparks, the type of baseballs being used, and the better conditioning of players plus the medical care available to them to name just three.<\/p>\n Whatever combination you want to put it down to, it is a quite astonishing jump.<\/p>\n In relation to Bautista, the name from the more recent crop of the \u00e2\u20ac\u02dc50 club\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 that stands out is Brady Anderson.\u00c2\u00a0 Both players reached the total despite having a relatively low season-high total before their breakout year.\u00c2\u00a0 Anderson reached the fifty mark in the final game of the Baltimore Orioles\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 1996 season and before then his highest total had been\u00c2\u00a0twenty-one in 1992.\u00c2\u00a0 As noted in last week\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s column<\/a>, Bautista\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s highest total prior to this season was\u00c2\u00a0sixteen in 2006.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n Anderson went straight back down to\u00c2\u00a0eighteen home runs in 1997 and his best season total after that point was\u00c2\u00a0twenty-four in 1999.\u00c2\u00a0 It will be interesting to see whether Bautista follows a similar path or if he goes the other way and joins the even-more exclusive list of players (currently nine in total) who have hit\u00c2\u00a0fifty home runs in a season twice.<\/p>\n In any case, Bautista has now hit the fifty mark once and that alone puts him in the record books.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0Maybe someday Greg Halman will earn a mention in there too.<\/p>\n Don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t think too much<\/strong><\/p>\n My favourite home run of the past week wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t historic and it wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t particularly important either.\u00c2\u00a0 It came in the Friday day-game at Wrigley Field between the St. Louis Cardinals and Chicago Cubs.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n The Cardinals\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 Allen Craig had worked a 3-2 count in the bottom of the first inning with two runners on base and the Cubs\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 battery of Tom Gorzelanny and Koyie Hill was undecided as to what pitch to throw next.\u00c2\u00a0 Hill ran through several combinations of signs and was met by only a shake of the head from his pitcher.\u00c2\u00a0 The catcher got out from his squat and jogged to the mound, not only to talk it over with Gorzelanny but also to end Albert Pujols\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 fun of staring straight in at the signs from second base.<\/p>\n After the routine, yet always amusing, sight of pitcher and catcher talking through their gloves, Hill and Gorzelanny returned to their positions.\u00c2\u00a0 With their deeply considered plan of attack agreed, Gorzelanny went into his wind-up and delivered the pitch.<\/p>\n And Craig casually golfed it into the bleachers for a three-run home run.<\/p>\n You can just imagine what former manager Lou Piniella would have made of it had he been in the dugout.\u00c2\u00a0 The phrase ‘better off out of it’ springs to mind.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Thursday was a great day for European baseball. Greg Halman took the field at the Rogers Centre for the Seattle Mariners and became the latest Dutchman to make the Major Leagues<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,4],"tags":[553],"class_list":["post-9256","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weekly-hit-ground-ball","category-mlb-2","tag-mlb-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9256","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9256"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9256\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9275,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9256\/revisions\/9275"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}