While some of our favorite teams might not be doing as well as hoped, there is certainly a flood of outstanding individual performances from the Dominican baseball contingent in the US Major Leagues. Forty-six-year-old Julio Franco is having a great year with the playoff-bound Atlanta Braves and is just three hits away from becoming the oldest player ever to get 100 hits in a year. The now-banned Pete Rose got 107 hits when he was 44 years and 145 days old, but Franco is already the oldest player ever to have a pinch hit homerun and also the oldest ever to hit a grand slam homerun. Then there is the very famous A-Rod, Alex Rodriguez, who is just one of three players to hit 35 homeruns and score 100 runs over seven straight seasons. Alex joinng Jimmy Foxx (9 times) and Babe Ruth (7 times) in that category. A-Rod has maintained these numbers for 9 seasons in a row, but he is chasing the great Hank Aaron, who did it 13 times between 1955 and 1967. Vladimir Guerrero, trying to go from the worst team in baseball (Montreal Expos) to the playoffs with the Anaheim Angels, has posted some impressive numbers, setting a team record for runs scored and becoming only the second player in the team’s history to have both 120 runs scored and 120 runs batted in. Albert Pujols, the star third-baseman for the St Louis Cardinals, and a leading candidate for the MVP award in the National League, joined Hall of Famers Ted Williams and Joe Dimaggio as the only players in baseball history to drive in 500 runs in their first four seasons of Major League play. Pujols is the fourth player to have 100 RBIs in the first four seasons of play. He already has 388 total bases this year, while only three other Cardinals have ever reached 400 in the long history of the team. Miguel Tejada, who went from the Oakland As to the Baltimore Orioles in the off-season, established a team record for RBIs by beating Rafael Palmiero’s 142 obtained back in 1996. He is also the player with the highest current consecutive game streak at 780, the longest stretch since Cal Ripkin Jr. And, finally, pitcher Bartolo Colon is one of four pitchers to win 16 games in his first year with the Anaheim Angels, joining Hall of Famer Nolan Ryan, Bill Singer, and Bert Blyleven.
Along with Greg Maddux, Colon is the only Major League pitcher currently active with 14 or more wins over the past 7 seasons.