This season, there have been a fair few baseball oddities at Roundshaw (the home of the Pirates) – only last week, for instance, a second baseman dropped an easy catch, but the ball deflected to the glove of the incoming right fielder instead of finding the turf. However, perhaps no play has been more unlikely than a put-out in the 4th inning of the first part of yesterday’s double-header between Croydon and Richmond.

The Pirates’ Guy Lidbetter was the hitter, and he cracked a line-drive to right field. I had my eyes on the ball’s trajectory rather than Lidbetter’s journey down the first-base line, but he appeared to be hustling, and possible even thinking about extra bases. Unfortunately for the batter, the ball found the right fielder (Ryan Bird), who was playing fairly shallow. Bird got the ball into the first baseman quickly, in fact so quickly that it beat Lidbetter to the base, meaning that the batter was an unfortunate recipient of a “9-3″ notation in the scorebook. Essentially, he had hit the ball too hard.

For the record, the Flames’ thrower Cody Cain pitched a 7-inning shut-out in that game, and was supported by four Richmond runs. The sweep was completed with a more comfortable 5-inning 10-0 victory. I was quite relieved at the truncation of the second game, as the sunburn I’d picked up at the Test Match yesterday was dangerously close to getting a chilblain on top of it.

Sorry about just dropping in the Test Match thing, but it’s been a while since I last saw England play, and, anyway, I’m going to try to make it relevant to baseball, via an admittedly circuitous route.

During the course of the match, several approaching or just-passed milestones were indicated on the big TV screen at the ground, which adds a bit to the game but is also meant to elicit applause at the time the milestone is reached. But I’m not one to just clap a milestone - simply because there are lots of pretty zeros in a row - without thought of whether applause is deserved. So when it was revealed that the South African Graeme Smith had just scored his 5000th run in Test cricket when captaining his country my hands remained clasped to my binoculars.  

Why? Because, in my opinion, this is an artificial milestone in that the 600 or so runs he scored when he was not captaining the team were essentially no different from those he has scored since taking on the captaincy. (Also, my hands were still a little sore from clapping Monty Panesar for, well, for being Monty).

Milestones are, of course, all artificial in that the thing you do just before getting to the milestone and the thing you do to move on from the milestone are no different from the thing you do to reach the milestone.  It is worth noting here that in cricket it is also possible to reach a milestone of milestones (such as [applaud here for the 500th word of the article] a century of centuries).

But milestones do serve a valid purpose (and not just in their non-metaphorical sense of telling a road user how far he or she must travel to reach the next town), in that they allow fans to recognize players’ achievements during the course of their careers (or in the case of cricket their match performance too), at well-spaced intervals. They are the metronomes by which fans should give players standing ovations; the quicker the milestones come up, the faster the metronome. (Incidentally, going by the “milestone tracker” on MLB.com, the Metrodome metronome is ticking slowly at the moment.)

An MLB milestone [applaud here for the 300th word written since Joe had a break for coffee - I can't hear you. What? Don't give me that old sore hands excuse] that I stayed up late to listen to last week was Ichiro’s 3000th professional hit. He was kind enough to do this in the 1st inning of the game (bearing in mind that there was an 8-hour time difference between his bat and my ears). These 3000 hits comprised 1722 in the States and 1278 in Japan (during nine seasons with the Orix Blue Waves). Personally, I think this milestone was worth recognizing but perhaps a little over-hyped, but, hey, I had no problem because, well, because it was Ichiro.

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