Another big night for Ichiro Suzuki, as he picks up 4 hits as the Mariners rout the Angels. In two nights, Ichiro has gone from looking shaky to looking like a sure thing to break the record of 257 hits in one season by George Sisler. These numbers are based on Ichrio getting 44 more AB this season.

Just so people are clear on what these numbers mean, let's look at the probability based on Ichiro's career. Ichiro is currently a career .339 hitter. If you took a .339 hitter, gave him 44 AB, recorded the results and repeated the experiment thousands of times, you would find that he would break the record in 92.3% of those experiments. You would also find that in 95% of the experiments, he accumulated between 9 and 21 hits. (In 2.5% of the experiments he would get less than 9 hits; in another 2.5% of experiments he'd get more than 21 hits.) Notice, two that we would expect his BA to be anywhere from .205 to .473.

So in April, when Ichiro had 102 AB and 26 hits, he was at the low range of his 95% confidence interval (25 to 44). However, July and August were both outliers for Ichiro. The 95% confidence interval for July was 30 to 50, and Ichiro knocked out 51 hits. In August, the interval was 31 to 51, and Ichiro had 56 hits.

To take this back to yesterday's discussion, maybe Melvin should not have freed him from working on plate discipline. His April numbers could have happened by chance. (Not mentioned is that he hit .274 in June.) If the Mariners had forced Suzuki to try to be selective for another month, he might have hit .400 in May anyway.