the shrewdness of apes

"If I chased numbers, maybe I wouldn't have as good results."

moving on to a different kind of diamond, let's spend a little time looking at Ichiro!. after last night's 3-for-5 effort (his 5th straight mutli-hit game) he now has 217 hits, leaving him 40 short of the major league record for hits in a season with 29 games to play. as of April 30 he was hitting just .255, and this was coming on the heels of a terrible finish to last season. but since then he has hit exactly .400, raising his average to .374 and giving Mariners fans at least one reason to keep watching. i'm not going to get into a whole debate here about his value as a player. yes he doesn't walk much, meaning his OBP is very dependent on his BAve, he doesn't hit for much power, and he didn't deserve that MVP award in 2001. but changing his approach at the plate could be disastrous. let's just say he's very good and a lot of fun to watch and look at the big questions for the rest of the season:

can he break the hit record? well, in the 132 games he's played this year (missing only July 10) he has averaged 1.64 hits per game. if he kept that average over the final 29 games and played every day, he would amass more 48 hits and break the record with a few days to spare. put another way, if he continues his average of 4.39 ABs per game he would get 127 more ABs for the year (putting him at 707, which would also be a record). giving him credit as a .374 hitter, he has a 93% chance of breaking the record in the course of 127 ABs. using his lifetime major league average of .338, he still has about a 74% chance to make history. if he could average 5 ABs per game the rest of the season (which is doubtful given the rest of the Mariners offense), he becomes a virtual lock, with a 99.5% or 95.4% chance of getting it depending on which batting average you use as the baseline.

can he hit .400? time is running out on this one. to hit .400 with 707 ABs, he would need to finish with 283 hits, meaning he would have to hit 66-for-127 (.520) the rest of the way. that seems pretty damned impossible, and the probability bears out that assumption. if we assume that Ichiro! is a .374 hitter (meaning that in each at-bat over time there is a 37.4% chance that he will get a hit), the odds that he would get 66 hits in any random set of 127 at-bats are 0.00058 or 0.058%. if we go by his career average of .338, those odds get even slimmer. if we were to consider him a .400 hitter he still only checks in with a 0.4% chance to hit .400 for the season. even stretching him out to 5 ABs per game does little to help him. only if we gave him credit for being a .463 hitter (his average for August) would we start getting into the realm of real possibility: about an 11.7% chance he could do it. too bad, but i'm still rooting for him to get the hit record.