Derek Jeter's 3,000th Hit

I was thinking last night about how only regular season statistics count for a player's career numbers, and rightly so. But what if you included Derek Jeter's hits from the postseason and All-Star Games, since they count and all that nonsense, to come to the time when he really recorded hit number 3,000 as a major leaguer? We can figure that out thanks to baseball-reference.com.

Jeter has 185(!) career postseason hits and ten hits in his 11 All-Star Game appearances, including those that "didn't count" before the 11-inning tie in 2002. That means we would have to subtract 195 from his current total of 2,998 to find the true 3,000th hit in Jeter's career. This would have occurred on his 2,805th regular season hit, which was a double against Francisco Liriano in the fifth inning of a 3-2 Yankees win at Target Field on May 26, 2010. If you don't want to include the ten hits from All-Star Games, it was a single in the fifth inning against Mitch Talbot in an 11-2 Yankees win against the Indians at Yankee Stadium on May 31. Both of these hits came in games in which Andy Pettitte was the Yankees starter.

Congratulations to those of you who were there! And congratulations to Jeter on his upcoming 3,000th regular season hit.

American Idol 10 predictions

I thought I was gonna do this for the top ten, but there's shockingly a second week of the top eleven.

11 - Thia Megia - kind of boring and finally in the bottom three last week
10 - Stefano Langone - already saved once as a wild card pick but didn't come back as strong as I thought he would
9 - Haley Reinhart - sounds like she's trying too hard and not that good
8 - Paul McDonald - getting tired of his oddly raspy voice
7 - Scotty McCreery - more like McDreary, the country singer always goes too far for my taste
6 - Naima Adedapo - has some talent but doesn't put it to great use
5 - Casey Abrams - good save used by the judges, but he doesn't have mainstream appeal
4 - Lauren Alaina - shows that she can do country and pop and can be the second place woman
3 - Jacob Lusk - could win, but a little too much on the feminine side
2 - James Durbin - falls short just like his gay doppelganger Adam Lambert
1 - Pia Toscano - provided she does more than ballads, since she has the best voice

It's tough to judge after a week of songs all by the same person, but they are all strong singers. It's a matter of appealing to the crowd and what is popular today. Pia and James have got it.