The Hiroshima Carp appear to be in a state of flux this season.
They've been hovering around .500 for most of the year with a team whose
starters have largely been determined by each day's casualty count.
Takuya Kimura, a surprise all-star last year at second base has had to make adjustments to keep the fish moving in the right direction.
With injuries to veteran outfield stars Tomonori Maeda and Koichi Ogata, Kimura has returned to his out field roots. As a little known reserve outfielder and pinch runner, he spent four seasons toiling in obscurity for the Nippon Ham Fighters before catching his break with the Carp.
But instead of a year refining his skills at second, which would be his preference, Kimura has spent much of this season in center field.
"If I insisted (on playing one position), I wouldn't be where I am today," Kimura said before last Friday's game at Tokyo Dome.
Prior to Hiroshima's sweep of the Giants, Yomiuri left-hander Darrell May described the Carp as a scrappy team, a label that Kimura believes describes the Carp perfectly.
"I guess we have to be," said Kimura. "We're young and we have some speed, but we've also had a lot of injured guys. If we keep plugging away, we can stay in position to win games."
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Kenjiro Nomura, the veteran anchor of Hiroshima's infield at shortstop has also been getting used to life at third base.
With the developing young duo of Akihiro Higashide, 20, at short and Takahiro Arai, 24, at third, there didn't seem to be any place for Nomura to play. But the injury bug and continued difficulties with defense have opened the door for Nomura at the hot corner.
Confident as always, Nomura believes he's the best shortstop on the team, but that it's in the club's interest to let Higashide play everyday.
"There's a gap between my ability and the others," Nomura said. "But looking at the whole season and the year's to come, they (the young guys) can close that gap and to do that, they need to play.
"I like this team, so I want to stay ready to play when I can. People get injuries and get tired. It's a long season. I can still play and I will."
When Nomura returned to the lineup a few weeks ago, he hit a late-inning home run that paved the way for a Carp victory. The blast was reported in several newspaper as being the effort of a true team leader, but Nomura has problems with that description.
"I don't think you can have a team leader everyday. The game's too hard. But you do need leaders, game leaders, a guy who will take on the challenge for a game at a time. That's more practical.
"The media writes about someone being a team leader, but that's overly simplistic."
Nomura, who trains in Hawaii in the offseason, stated publicly several years ago that he wanted to give the major leagues a shot. But when he first became a free agent, he passed, opting to stay in Hiroshima.
But does he still here the call of the major leagues?
"I'm 35," he said, with a look on his face that suggested it was the dumbest question he'd heard in a long while.
"But yes, I'd still like to play there, but time is an issue," he said. "I have a lot of friends (in the States) so I don't think the lifestyle would be any problem.
"It's an attractive idea, but...," he ended and left it that.
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Another key part of Hiroshima's success has been the power surge from infielder Eddy Diaz.
Diaz, due to his short stature, does not have the look of a big bopper as his countrymen Alex Cabrera, Roberto Petagine and Alex Ramirez do. But since the tail-end of the 2000 season, Diaz has been regularly hitting some big homers for the Carp.
But now that his home run power is no secret, Diaz expects to see fewer and fewer fastballs in the strike zone.
"I talked to Alex Cabrera on the phone," said Diaz. "And he told me he just looks for one pitch, a breaking ball out of the strike zone."
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One reader felt the Hot Corner was out in left field on May 17 regarding the probabilities of Joe DiMaggio's 55-game hitting streak. He writes:
...most sabermatricians know the Yankee Clipper hit in 61 straight games in the Pacific Coast League as a 19-year-old. Obviously if any MLBer was going to break Wee Willie Keeler's record this was the guy.
Check out any book on Joe D and you'll see, amazin' as it was, there's no way the odds were 4,739-1 in his case.
Yours, Biff
Thanks for the card.
Reader Biff was probably not the only one surprised to find that the chances of Joe DiMaggio replicating his streak during any given 56 games in the prime of his career were so low. (That column had the chances in the prime of his career as being 82,829-1. This is clearly an error. In 1939, his chances in any 56 games were about 5,500-1.)
The chances were for the actual 56 games in question, not a whole season and not a career. DiMaggio's most likely season for equaling Keeler's streak of 44 games was probably his 1936 rookie year. That season he had one chance in 449 of tying the major league record of 44 straight games every time he started a new game.
His chance of not equaling Keeler's record in 138 games--and in the 44 games starting his 1937 season--was close to 75 percent. Joe's chance of not hitting in 56 straight games that year was around 98 percent.
For his career as a whole, the Yankee Clipper had about a 58 percent chance to equal Keeler's record and a five percent chance of getting a hit in 56 games in a row.
The model used to calculate these chances did not account for DiMaggio ever getting only one at-bat in a game, something that must have happened a few times in his career, nor did it account for the changing probabilities of getting a hit.
More variability would have made his task quite a bit more difficult than the numbers otherwise suggest.
As Biff points out, DiMaggio's 61-game hitting streak for the San Francisco Seals indicates a hitter who is determined as all heck to keep it going.
DiMaggio's determination might have made him somewhat more likely than his average and number of at-bats per game would suggest.
The chances that DiMaggio would break Keeler's record were excellent. They would have been even better had he not missed three full seasons in the prime of his career to World War II.
Even if he had played from 1943-1945, he wouldn't have been a lock. And at slightly better than 19-1 chances its hard to say that DiMaggio was hardly a lock for 56 games either.
It wasn't something that happened just by chance. His effort was truly remarkable and one to be cherished.
The Hot Corner appears each Thursday in The
Daily Yomiuri .