Here's a fun list.  It's batters who had seasons with 502+ PA and a Batting Average on Balls In Play of .400 or better.

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Yesterday, Carlos Beltran had the first 3-HR game of the 2011 season. It took a long time to get there. Check out total such games from each year since the beginning of The Steroids Era:

(Aside: is there any doubt that 2001 was the peak offensive year? Runs/game was quite as high as some other nearby years, but it seems like just about every individual offensive stat was at a high in 2001.)

It took until the Mets' 37th game for any player in MLB to hit 3 HRs in a game.

In 2010, there has been 2 such games by the time each team played 37 games.

In 2009, though, there were no 3 HR games within each team's first 37 games, and yet there were 8 in the remainder of the season.

So, we'll see what happens this year. As with all rare events (like triples, which we recently talked about) they can sometimes come in bunches, or sometimes go long stretches with none.

Here are some other baseball license plates I've seen recently.

First up: 683 HR6

That's gotta be about Pedro Guerrero, who hit 6 homers in June of 1983.

Next: 597 ER9

That's about these 3 guys, who each gave up 9 earned runs in a game in May of 1997:

Lastly: 218 CEY

Clearly it's about Ron Cey, but I can't figure out the 218. He was born on February 15th, which could be 215, but not 218.

Just to explain this post, these are real license plate tags that I've spotted. They are clearly not vanity plates, just randomly-generated ones.

John Lackey is off to a very rough start this year. He's already got 3 games where he's allowed at least 8 earned runs. You have to go back to 2006 to find a pitcher with at least 4 such games in an entire season, much less so early in a season:

To get a sense of just how bad it is, Lackey is just the 3rd pitcher since 1919 to have 3 games with 8+ earned runs in his team's first 37 games of the season:

For some reason, it hasn't been very widely reported that Lackey's wife was diagnosed with breast cancer during the off-season. Even if her prognosis is good, that's a tough situation to go through. Dealing with the medical issues alone takes up a lot of time and energy, and that's before considering the anxiety and anguish that can occur as well.

From a baseball standpoint, Lackey's poor performance may be because his thoughts are with his wife.  Life is way more important than baseball and I can't blame Lackey if his focus on the field isn't as good as in previous seasons. Hopefully she will get through it and get a clean bill of health, and, secondarily, Lackey can get back to pitching to his capability.

Through yesterday's games, Jose Reyes led the majors with 6 triples. Those came in 36 games, a pace of 27 for a full 162-game schedule.

It's not likely that Reyes is gonna get 27 triples, though. Nobody's even hit as many as 25 triples in a season since 1925:

Even 20 triples rarely happens:

But it's far less rare for a guy to have 6 triples in his team's first 36 games. Since 1919 it's been done a total of 107 times (I had to do a couple of different searches but there are 104 guys here who did it and another 3 here.)

Imagine that...107 times a guy had 6 triples in his team's first 36 games, but not a single one of those guys kept that pace up for the entire season.

ESPN.com recently celebrated its 15th anniversary. I am amazed it hasn't been a lot longer than that--I feel like I've been reading sports news on there for a lot longer.

On my Nolan Ryan post from yesterday, the second poll asks readers to classify Ryan's rank all-time. Judging by the first thousand votes on the poll, it looks like his median position is somewhere between #30 and #40 all-time.

On the EloRater, he's currently at 14th all-time.

Not much else to say...just a coupe of observations there.

Looking at this painting got me to look at this boxscore.  Related, via google, I found this Times article which references "triple steals." 

Was May 27, 2008 the last time in baseball that we had a triple steal?  It seems that way.  Anyone know?

How many players, since 1919, had 14+ games within his team's first 25 games of the season where he had 3+ PA in the contest with no hits?

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Via BuzzFeed.com, our friends at the New York Times have made what has been dubbed the Nerdiest Correction Ever, at the intersection of baseball and The Hobbit.

If you're having a bad day (or even if not) this is guaranteed to make you smile.