Caps off to The Captain, Derek Jeter, on tying Lou Gehrig’s hit mark

Jeter and Gehrig, the spirit of the Yankees

It took me a while to appreciate the greatness of Derek Jeter, who tonight in New York tied Lou Gehrig for a record 2,721 hits in a Yankees’ uniform. He’ll undoubtedly break the record in the next few games, and I hope he keeps on swinging until he reaches 3,000 hits.

For most of my life, the Yankees were the enemy, bullies in high-priced pinstripes beating up on teams from the small markets where I happened to live – Cleveland, Seattle, Oakland. They even tormented me in Omaha, where the Kansas City Royals have kept their Class A farm club for many years.

From the hinterlands I had caught Jeter on TV, and he was no doubt a quality ballplayer. But I didn’t watch him regularly. Then I transferred to Midtown Manahttan and lived nearby. Slowly, inevitably, I was drawn in by the Yankees’ tractor beam pulsing from the South Bronx. At first, Paul O’Neill was my favorite Yankee, and when he moved on I got behind Jorge Posada.

Over the years, I started noticing Jeter more and more. I managed to miss the spectacular play he made along the first base line in a 2001 playoff game against Oakland, impossibly intercepting an errant outfield throw and flinging the ball to Posada at the plate to cut down Jeremy Giambi. But there was a night a year or two later when the Yankees were playing the Red Sox. Jeter went tearing after a pop foul and speared it as he tumbled into the first row of seats. Watching the game in our basement family room, my younger son and I looked at each other wide-eyed, knowing we’d just seen something exceptional.

In career of exceptional achievement, Jeter is having one of his best years in 2009. Hats off the Yankee captain, who is worthy of the accolades and superlatives accorded him.

Ichiro gets his 2,000th MLB hit

A tip of the cap and a deep bow to the honorable Ichiro Suzuki, who struck his 2,000th major-league hit this afternoon in Oakland. Those hits came after the 1,278 hits he had playing in Japan before crossing the Pacific to play for the Mariners.

Ichiro’s accomplishments are remarkable. Statistically, he’s one of the greatest hitters ever. Even more, he fully opened up the game to players from Asia. Yes, there had been Japanese players before him, but Ichiro has proven irrefutably that a Japanese player can be a superstar in the great American pastime. The game and the world are better for it.

The All-American baseball cap, by way of China

This is 2009, and Google pretty much rules the world. For no particular reason, tonight I typed “baseball caps” into the Google Images search bar to see what would come up first.

And here it is, at right: the “6 Panels Baseball Cap with Brass Buckle” as displayed on made-in-china.com.

The irony cannot be escaped. The first image for the All-American baseball cap is a generic black hat on a Web site in China where, for all I know, the people are banned from viewing my blog (poor comrades!).

I did a quick check of several of the caps in my closet, and at least half were made in China. Of the Major League Baseball caps I checked, the Giants, Cubs and Nationals all said “made in China.” My Phillies and Mariners caps are from Macau, and the Marlins lid is from Bangladesh. I couldn’t determine the origin of my Brewers lid, which is from New Era.

I’ve come to two conclusions. The Chinese must love our national pastime, if only for economic reasons. And I need to find a few more caps from the American League.

Caps on sale at MLB.com

In the market for a new cap or two? Major League Baseball has a sale on at its online store: Buy one cap, get the second of equal or lesser value at a 50 percent discount.  The sale runs through Aug. 3. It’s a great way to build your collection. A Seattle Mariners trident model, anyone?

Capping off the Home Run Derby

While not wearing a cap, Prince Fielder won the Home Run Derby tonight in St. Louis on the eve of the All-Star Game. In fact, several sluggers went capless in taking their hacks at Busch Stadium, and maybe that’s just as well. I was not keen on either of the league’s cap and jersey styles. To me, the All-Star Game always has been special, and seeing all the caps and colors from the various teams represented made it so.

One of my Twitter buddies, who posts a San Francisco Giants blog called Nuschlers News, asked during the derby if anyone besides him preferred the old days when the players wore their own team uniforms or at least their team caps while at the All-Star Game. I’m not sure how many replies he received, but all but two preferred players wearing their own apparel.

The derby is a lot of fun, and our family usually makes a point to watch, although it’s a little more difficult out here in the Pacific time zone than it was when we lived in the Eastern.

The kids running loose in the outfield to retrieve flyballs is a nice, if calculated, touch. You can imagine the baseball marketing guys saying, “Let’s remind everybody that this is a game for kids played by men who still are kids at heart.” Yeah, yeah. And let’s all profit richly (by selling All-Star uniforms and caps, say?).

But I shan’t crab anymore. The All-Star Game and the hoopla surrounding it are genuine American creations and traditions. I can’t remember if the players revert to their own uniforms and caps in the game itself, but I certainly hope that’s what happens tomorrow night. I want to see Tim Lincecum in San Francisco orange and black standing on the sidelines for the anthem with Manny Ramirez in his Dodger blue, Derek Jeter in Yankee pinstripes and Ichiro sporting the Mariners’ compass rose. Those “ordinary” uniforms gathered on one diamond underscore just how special a night it is.

Ken Griffey Jr. returns to the Seattle Mariners…

… and there was great rejoicing in the land — especially in the Pacific Northwest.

When I first heard the rumblings a few days ago that Ken Griffey Jr. might return to the Mariners, I tried to keep from getting too excited about the possibility. In today’s big-money baseball world, team allegiances are more fading memory than reality. But still, I always harbored a hope that Junior would return to Seattle. Word broke this evening that Griffey had signed with the Mariners, and it brought back a lot of wonderful baseball memories.

I lived in Seattle when Griffey joined the M’s, and we knew we were watching the arrival of an extraordinary talent. Like Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays, he was a centerfielder with all the tools: speed, power, defense, a head for the game. But most of all, Junior brought a boyish joy to the ballpark every night.

Yankee Stadium always seemed to bring out the best in him, and I vividly remember watching on TV a sensational catch he made one night in the Bronx, springing off the warning track to whip a homerun ball from the top of the fence. When he landed, he broke into a huge grin and charged back to the infield, holding the ball in triumph. If there’s a better Griffey moment, I haven’t seen it.

You can see the catch at the start of this Griffey highlight reel posted on mlb.com. That’s Randy Johnson, the Big Unit, on the pitching mound. I believe No. 29 at the plate for the Yanks is Jesse Barfield (as best as I can tell from the video and this nifty Yankees uniform number database).

I have many other memories of Griffey’s early days with the Mariners, but I’ll spare you the bulk of them. But I must mention the night Griffey and his father hit back-to-back homeruns. Our family was returning from somewhere in Eastern Washington, and we strained to hear the at bats over the crackling radio signal as we crossed the Cascade Range on Interstate 90.

Griffey has been hobbled by injuries for much of his career. I wish him great health in the year ahead. And I hope the Mariners will, at least for one game, go back to the old yellow-on-blue caps that the team wore in the early 90s when The Kid was still a kid.

Which cap for Rickey in the Hall of Fame?

Players elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame no longer get to choose which cap they’ll be depicted wearing in the bronze plaque that enshrines them. There’s no question that Jim Rice, who played his entire career for Boston, will be wearing a Red Sox cap.

But what about Rickey Henderson? In a 25-year major league career, he played for the Oakland Athletics, New York Yankees, Toronto Blue Jays, San Diego Padres, Anaheim Angels, New York Mets, Boston Red Sox, Seattle Mariners and Los Angeles Dodgers.

If there’s any debate, it’s between the A’s and the Yankees. He spent several years with each of those teams and only a season or two at most with the others. For me, there’s no question he should be enshrined as a member of the A’s, with whom he spent roughly half his career.

I think if you ask the average baseball fan what team Henderson played for, most fans would say “A’s” first.

I was fortunate to see Henderson tie Lou Brock’s single-season stolen base record at Milwaukee County Stadium in 1982. While I missed the next game, at which he broke the record, I got to cover a news conference he had the next morning.

While he always impressed me with his speed and hustle as a young player, I found him even more impressive in his 40s as he tried to hang on in the big leagues. He was playing Atlantic League ball for the Newark Bears when I last saw him on the field. It was in either 2003 or 2004 when I saw him get tossed out of a game against the Somerset Patriots for mouthing off to an ump.

For all his accomplishments, and his competitive fire, Rickey Henderson truly is a worthy member of the Hall of Fame.

A new cap for the Big Unit

Randy Johnson has signed a one-year contract with the San Francisco Giants, and that’s good news for baseball fans by the bay. Even at 45, The Big Unit has some good games left in that 6′10″ frame. The move to the Giants will be a bit of a homecoming for Johnson, who grew up nearby in Livermore, Calif. He’s aiming to reach 300 career victories (he needs five), and I suspect the Giants hope in between starts he’ll be able to tutor Tim Lincecum, Matt Cain and the other young pitchers on staff.

Johnson is a thoroughly modern superstar in that he’s hopped from team to team in this era of free agency. He came up with the Montreal Expos and spent several years with the Seattle Mariners, although I can’t recall ever having seen him pitch in the Kingdome when I lived there. He played briefly for the Houston Astros in 1998 (a stretch of his career I can’t remember at all) before signing with the Arizona Diamondbacks. He had some great years there, jumped to the New York Yankeees for 2005-06 before returning to Phoenix.

The MLB Web site didn’t waste any time posting a picture of Johnson in his new orange-and-black threads and cap. The Giants will have an excellent pitching staff in 2009. Now if they could only add a power hitter or two, then they’d really have something.

The ecstasy – and the agony – of September baseball

April is the cruelest month, T.S. Elliott said. But he never had to suffer through September on a baseball club eliminated from playoff contention in August. That’s the plight of the Seattle Mariners, who’ve been left in the dusty cellar of the American League West. As I write this post, the M’s are 30.5 games behind the division-leading Los Angeles Angels.

It reminds me of one terrible season when the Cleveland Indians were eliminated very early from the American League race — probably when they finished eighth in 1967 — and the Cleveland Press ran a sarcastic banner headline: “INDIANS LOSE PENNANT.”

So I feel for the Mariners, the San Diego Padres and the other sad sack franchises whose only taste of playoff excitement will be as a spoiler in late September games against the few lucky teams scratching and clawing for the playoffs.

I should note that I picked up my Mariners cap not when I lived in Seattle but while coaching one of my boys’ Little League teams in the San Francisco Bay area. The hat is a basic snap-plastic adjustable model.

I always chuckle a little when looking at the Mariners color scheme. When the caps were redesigned in the early 90s, the team insisted that the colors were navy blue and, absurdly, Northwest green.

If that bill is green and not teal, then my name is Ken Griffey Jr.