Here are the longest consecutive-game HR streaks in Adrian Gonzalez's career:

He has a chance to tie his own career high.

Remember Mary Jane Schriner, the woman who dated George Steinbrenner when they were teenagers? We linked to several of her stories last fall:

Bloops: Summers With George Steinbrenner

Bloops: Steinbrenner’s Comeuppance

Bloops: More George Steinbrenner Memories

Schriner wanted to share her letters from Steinbrenner with the world, but apparently the Yankees are going to great lengths to make sure they never see the light of day. (Even though Schriner possesses them, the copyright is owned by the person who wrote them -- or, in this case, his heirs.)

Dashiell Bennett of Business Insider summarizes the frustrating saga of Big Stein's letters here:

The George Steinbrenner Love Letter That The Yankees Don't Want You To Read

Update: According to Bennett, Schriner is willing to sell the letters to a collector, either individually or as a collection.

Since 1951, nearly 300 different players have had at least one game with 3 home runs.

Among those players, here are the guys with the fewest total career HR:

Now, a few of these guys are active and quite unlikely to stay on this list. But interestingly, I can remember the 3-HR games for just about all the recent players on this list. For one, Tuffy Rhodes' opening day performance was recently discussed here.

Using their seasonal June 30th ages, here are the players to hit 40+ homers at least once at the age of 29 or older who never did it at age 28 or younger:

In this case, the 'years' column refers to the number of times they hit 40 HR after the age of 29. Of these 45 guys, the most recent to do it was Jose Bautista last year. Bautista is a more interesting case since he never had more than 16 HR in any previous season.

If we whittle down the list to guys who never hit more than 20 before age 29, then we're left with just 7 names: Bautista, Cy Williams, Davey Johnson, Hank Sauer, Ken Caminiti, Luis Gonzalez, and Dante Bichette.

Those wondering how I did this search--first I did a batting season finder for guys Age 29 and older with 40+ seasons, and then I used that search result as a basis for two new batting season finder searchers (for players 28 and under with 40+ or 20+ HR seasons).  I then had to compare the lists manually to see which names were missing, but it took only a few minutes since the first search eliminated so many names.

I got to see Bryce Harper play last night, in person. Have you seen his minor stats, to date? Here they are:

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Last night, Andruw Jones was the starting DH for the Yankees (filling in for Jorge Posada) and he batted 9th, which was going to be Posada's spot before he asked out of the game.

As you might guess, a DH starting in the 9th spot in the lineup doesn't happen all that often:

Some observations about this list:

• This list goes back to the 2009 season, and a few players appear twice. Jose Molina is one of them, but he did it for two different teams!
• Many of these occasions seem to me to perhaps be cases where the regular DH got the day off and a backup player was pulled off the bench to fill in at DH, and logically stuck at the 9th spot in the order.
• There are 4 games on there from NL teams (two each from the Dodgers and Rockies.) I wonder what happened there--please don't tell me that the manager simply stuck a DH in for the pitcher at the 9th spot and didn't otherwise adjust his lineup? I guess that's possible if the manager strongly believed in the sanctity of his normal lineup and that he didn't want to move guys around. I have a hard time believing, however, that any given team doesn't have a batter who is normally a reserve player who is a better hitter than one of the other starting 8, therefore deserving to be higher in the batting order. Maybe it's a confidence thing--like the manager didn't want to move their normal 8th-place batter down to 9th, just in case it made him feel really bad about his hitting?

Most folks estimate that at least half of MLB players used steroids and/or other banned substances during The Steroids Era. Hall of Fame voters have clearly had a tough time determining how to handle different such as:

• admitted users
• players who appeared in the Mitchell report
• other suspected users
• players thought to be clean

Beyond even the Hall of Fame, it's not clear what to think of these players. Just about everybody can agree that Barry Bonds is one of the greatest players of all time, regardless of his PED use. Clearly his stats might have been padded to some degree, but even if we subtract 10-20% of his totals, his numbers are astounding. Plus, as many people have pointed out, his numbers and rate stats from the time before his alleged PED use are still really, really good. Is Bonds a disgusting cheater who deserves our derision? Maybe. But what if more than half the other players were doing it, too? Then don't they all deserve it? What if more than half the pitchers Bonds faced were on the juice too? Did he really have any advantage?

Thoughts like this lead many of us to simple say that the entire Era was tainted, and we'll never really know what happened, and therefore we just need to go by the numbers to evaluate the players. I tend to agree with this notion, until I start thinking about some of the details.

The problem with sweeping PED use under the rug is that just one group of people gets punished: those who did the right thing and avoided use of illegal substances.

My wife and I have noted many cases in life where competent people are punished:

• Sure, you showed up 2 hours early for your flight to allow plenty of time to get through security, but one of the big reasons why it takes so long is that they allowed people who didn't arrive early enough to jump ahead in the security line, making you wait even longer.
• You probably need to have uninsured driver's coverage on your own car insurance policy. That's right--you are responsible for insurance yourself against people who are breaking the law by not having car insurance for their car.
• There's probably one person in your family who's a bit more difficult than the others. This person might have certain requirements around family travel, organization of family activities, rules, etc., and in most cases, other family members end up spending a lot of time and energy accommodating this one person. In this case, the inflexible person gets everything they want, while all the flexible people are tied in knots.

There are about a million other examples of competence being punished, and The Steroid Era is another one. Let's say 80% of the players used steroids, HGH, or other stuff. That's so endemic that it's tough to do anything other than assume that everybody was using, i.e. just use the numbers as they are for evaluation. But then the 1 in 5 players who was clean is really being punished--just about every opponent he faced was juiced, and so how much were his own numbers hurt? I certainly feel much worse for a clean pitcher than any dirty pitcher who had to face Barry Bonds and the like.

And the worst part of it is that there's nothing these players can do. If they come out and say they were clean, not only will be not believe them (thanks to previous liars like David Ortiz, who said A-rod should be banned for a year before his own positive test result came out), but they look bad since they are throwing everybody else under the bus. They simply need to grin and bear it, knowing that they deserve better but that nobody will know. As more and more positive tests and admitted users come out, it just makes everybody look more guilty--it certainly doesn't make the isolated clean guys look any better.

Reader Will K. just emailed in to point out that Roy Halladay recently walked the opposing pitcher for the first time in his career. It happened the other day against Josh Johnson. Halladay has actually only faced the opposing pitcher 89 times in his career (thanks to mostly pitching in the AL) but that's still pretty impressive. (Aside: Halladay has also walked a pinch-hitter only once in 93 plate appearances.)

What other pitchers have walked the opposing pitcher very few times?

Incidentally, Will expressed frustration Over Jonathan Sanchez's performance in the same situation. Indeed, Sanchez has walked the opposing pitcher 13 times in 203 plate appearances.

Detroit Michael recently asked if any pitcher had a week like the one Brandon League had this week.  And, the answer is "yes."

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I don't know the answer to the title question. I have a hard time imagining the Yankees continuing to play Posada if he continues to hit so poorly, and I also wonder about the possibility of him retiring on his own.

But check out how historically poor his start has been.

Here are the guys (age 38 and older) since the 2002 season who had the most 0-fer games with at least 3 plate appearances in their team's first 34 games of the season:

Posada is way out in the lead here. And the seasons appearing on this list were the last in the big leagues for Giles, Castilla, Sosa, Lampkin, and Anderson.

Here are the leaders for previous 10-year periods:

1992-2001:

1982-1991:

1972-1981:

1962-1971:

Amazing, huh? Posada has been afforded an opportunity usually reserved for the all-time greats. I mean...think about that list of guys. Banks, Aaron, Schmidt, Brett, and...Posada? Don't get me wrong, I think Posada has had a fabulous career. I also think he's been allowed to play for too long and that it might well be time to hang 'em up.