Gary Caskey/ReutersRickey Henderson, stealing second in 1998, had a .401 career on-base percentage.

Generally regarded as the greatest leadoff hitter ever, Rickey Henderson thrilled baseball fans for a quarter century by stealing a major league-record 1,406 bases. Along the way, his feats on the base paths fueled the stereotype that speed is the leadoff man’s defining tool. But it wasn’t his base stealing that made him so effective in the leadoff spot; rather, it was his ability to get on base to begin with.

From a sabermetric perspective, the cardinal rule of leadoff hitting is to avoid making an out. The No. 1 spot in the order comes to the plate on average 4.8 times a game, nearly a full plate appearance more than the No. 9 hitter at 3.9, according to “The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball,” a baseball research reference by Tom Tango, Mitchel Lichtman and Andrew Dolphin. A table-setter like Henderson must be able to consistently provide run-scoring opportunities to the players batting behind him. He cannot score, let alone steal, if he is not on base.
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WASHINGTON – After an eventful game that extended the Mets’ winnings streak to six consecutive victories, one of the central figures of the game expressed a sentiment about the team’s expectations that had not been heard publicly before.

Daniel Murphy, who had two very big hits and one bad defensive mistake, said after the Mets beat the Washington Nationals, 6-3, to pull within two games of .500 at 11-13, that the Mets’ goal is to win 100 games this year.

“It’s a good win, but they’re all good,” he said. “We’re trying to get to a hundred. We’re a step closer.”
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I’ll admit it. I didn’t know much about Brent Lillibridge before he saved Tuesday’s game for the Chicago White Sox with two phenomenal catches at Yankee Stadium. All I really knew was that he was a utility man for the White Sox who had somehow hit the 10,000th home run in franchise history this month. Lillibridge has four home runs in parts of four seasons.

“That day I got the start against Dallas Braden, and me and Adam Dunn were actually talking about it: ‘Hey, whoever gets the first home run today gets 10,000,’” Lillibridge said on Wednesday. “I was like, ‘All right, I’ll get it,’ just totally joking. And I ended up getting it.”

Little did he know that the 10,000th home run in the history of a 111-year-old franchise would not be his personal highlight for the month. Lillibridge’s catches outshined eight-plus innings by Gavin Floyd and a two-run, go-ahead homer by Paul Konerko. Score one for the little guy.

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WASHINGTON — The minor mystery surrounding the Mets’ decision to keep the right-hander Dillon Gee on the roster and move him into the bullpen was at least partly answered on Wednesday.

Manager Terry Collins originally said he was prepared to use Gee in a normal relief role, but for now he is more of a shadow starter. Gee may be needed to start on Friday, or at least back up the ailing right-hander Mike Pelfrey, who is scheduled to start that day in Philadelphia.

Pelfrey has a stomach ailment so severe he has lost 11 pounds since it first struck on Friday, the day of his last start.

In fact, many of the Mets’ traveling party, including Jason Bay, Francisco Rodriguez, Chris Young and the SNY field reporter Kevin Burkhardt, have been felled by the bug that has swept through the clubhouse and caused a minor epidemic.

When Pelfrey came to work on Wednesday, the pitching coach Dan Warthen, who also fell ill recently, told Pelfrey that the Mets wanted him to pitch a day later, on Saturday, just to give him an extra day to recover. But Pelfrey persuaded Warthen to watch him to throw his normal bullpen session, which he had to cancel on Tuesday because of the illness, and make a decision afterward.

Afterward Pelfrey said he felt well enough to pitch on Friday, saying, “I’ll be ready to go,” but Warthen would not commit. Even if Pelfrey does make the start, the Mets will have Gee, who also threw a bullpen session, ready in case he cannot get out of the early innings.

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In the words of his manager, Rafael Soriano has had a bad month. A 7.84 earned run average and two costly eighth-inning meltdowns — including one in the Yankees’ 3-2 loss Tuesday night against the White Sox — makes Joe Girardi’s appraisal irrefutable.

What the Yankees are finding harder to quantify is why Soriano has struggled so mightily in his first month with the team. Is it a simple mechanical issue? Is it a matter of adjusting to a new role, setting up for
Mariano Rivera, after leading the American League in saves last year? Is it a slow acclimation to the pressures of playing in New York?

“The only way that he’s going to get used to pitching in the eighth inning is to pitch in the eighth inning,” Girardi said before Wednesday’s game against the White Sox. “And the only way his stuff is going to get better is to pitch. So that’s why I say, for me, he’s still my eighth-inning guy.”

Girardi all but ruled out a mechanical flaw, saying that Soriano’s velocity has gradually improved and that his usually impressive command had suffered most in frigid conditions. It was not necessarily good Tuesday, when he hit Carlos Quentin with a slider before allowing a game-winning two-run homer to Paul Konerko.

Soriano was not seen in the clubhouse Wednesday while it was open to reporters, but he has spoken before about the overall difficulties of the transition. On one level, Soriano has said he understands that his new job is similar to his old one — that is, pitching in important situations. On another, he has also said that there is a difference. There is no way of gauging whether it is a mental issue. Only Soriano knows how he feels.

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For most of its 45-year existence, the Oakland Alameda-County Coliseum had no corporate name.

But in 1998, the stadium was renamed for Network Associates, a computer software company. Then, from 2004 to 2008, it became McAfee Coliseum, when Network Associates returned to a previous name.

The home of the N.F.L.’s Raiders and baseball’s A’s has gone by its original name since, but it got a new one Wednesday: Overstock.com Coliseum.
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Manuel Balce Ceneta/Associated Press The Mets’ Chris Young allowed three runs, all of them on solo home runs, in four and two-thirds innings Tuesday at Washington.

WASHINGTON – Chris Young had the kind of outing Tuesday one might expect from a pitcher coming off the disabled list and dealing with flulike symptoms. Young was tagged for three monstrous home runs, two by Wilson Ramos and one by Jayson Werth, but he did not have a lot of base runners clogging the base paths. So the three home runs were all solo, and that enabled the Mets to stay in the game and eventually win, 6-4.

So, what can be taken away from Young’s performance leading into his next few starts and beyond? The main thing for the Mets is that Young said he was healthy.

“The shoulder felt good,” Young said. “It felt really good.”

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WASHINGTON — Less than a year after one of the most distasteful incidents in recent Mets history, the team made a return visit to Walter Reed Army Medical Center here Tuesday, this time led by Sandy Alderson, the team’s general manager and a Vietnam veteran.

Afterward, Alderson stressed the importance of the visit rather than focusing on who made the trip.

“I thought it was meaningful for all of us,” Alderson said, “but I certainly was taken by the spirit that the wounded soldiers and Marines exhibited, and the support that they’re getting from the hospital staff and so forth, and hearing their stories about how these injuries occurred was pretty sobering, so I think everybody who was there benefited from it.”

Last September, the Mets went to the hospital to spend time with wounded soldiers. But the visit became ensnarled in the Mets’ contentious internal politics when ownership became angered after Carlos Beltran, Luis Castillo and Oliver Perez — who were already at odds with management — declined to make the voluntary trip.

Perez and Castillo are no longer with the Mets. Beltran, who had visited the hospital before and was busy doing his own charity work that day, was able to go this time. The Mets took 42 people on the trip, which included all players except for relief pitchers Taylor Buchholz and Francisco Rodriguez. Rodriguez arrived in Washington too late to attend because he was spending the day with his children as part of a court-appointed visitation following his arrest last August on misdemeanor assault charges.

Jay Horwitz, the Mets’ spokesman, said that both players were excused and that the Mets had no problem with anyone who did not attend this time. Alderson said he thought it was important that those who went wanted to go.

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Yankees Manager Joe Girardi hopes to know late Wednesday what, if anything, is wrong with pitcher Phil Hughes, who was scheduled for a second day of tests after having two magnetic resonance imaging tests and a blood-circulation test on his right arm Tuesday.

“They’re going to try to rule out everything they possibly can,” Girardi said at a news conference at Yankee Stadium before his team played the White Sox.

A day after he cut short a bullpen session Monday at Yankee Stadium after about 15 pitches, Hughes, 24, said he had nearly two hours of testing Tuesday at New York Presbyterian Hospital. Hughes said before Tuesday’s game that he had not received any results.

Hughes has experienced a loss in velocity on his pitches, which resulted in an 0-1 record and a 13.94 earned run average in his first three starts. He said his first five pitches Monday felt good, and his second five pitches were O.K., but “something just left after that.”

He sat at his locker before batting practice Tuesday and said: “Nobody’s happy about it. It’s frustrating. But once I didn’t feel right after this, doing these tests was really the only other option in order to dig down deep and find out what was really going on.”

Hughes, who has been on the disabled list since April 15, estimated that he could pitch at 85 percent of what he considered to be normal, but when he was asked if he could win pitching at 85 percent, he replied, “When you’re not taking your best stuff out there, it’s difficult.”

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Here are a few players who have made an impression of late:

Jose Bautista — Typically you don’t pay retail for a player coming off a career year. But three weeks into 2011, Bautista’s 54-homer, .995-OPS 2010 seems quaint by comparison. Through April 24, Bautista sported a .359/.506/.750 line, including seven homers and 19 walks, and that’s after he missed three games to attend the birth of his daughter. Monday night, he hit his eighth homer and walked twice. Rays Manager Joe Maddon even compared him to Barry Bonds in the 2002 World Series, and the Rays’ All-Star pitcher David Price called him “probably the best hitter in the league right now.” All last season, we waited for him to fall to earth, and he did not. It’s possible he’s still getting better at age 30, and given how much the Blue Jays are running this year, I’d expect him to wind up with more than the nine steals he had in 2010 while qualifying at both third base and outfield. If we were to draft all over again, I’d take him in the middle of the first round.
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Kenny Williams flew commercial to New York on Monday, and his flight was delayed for two and a half hours. That is dangerous for the general manager of a team that has lost 10 of its last 11 games. Williams, the architect of the Chicago White Sox, got an earful from fans.

“I gave them all Ozzie’s number and told them to call him,” Williams said.

He was joking. At least, you would think. Williams and the White Sox’ manager, Ozzie Guillen, have sometimes clashed in their years together, but on Monday, Williams said he found no fault with Guillen or his coaches, specifically the hitting coach Greg Walker and the pitching coach Don Cooper.

“None of them have gotten any dumber in the last couple of weeks,” Williams said. “They’re the same guys. I have confidence in all of them.”

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Phil Hughes is a baseball player with an insightful mind, quick with an answer for everything, from hockey trivia to episodes of “The Office” to his own pitching motion. But now, Hughes is stumped, and so are the Yankees.

All the progress he made rebuilding his arm strength over the last 10 days stagnated Monday, when he cut short a bullpen session because his shoulder felt too dead to continue. It was his final test before he was to begin a minor league rehabilitation assignment Thursday, but those plans have been canceled, replaced by a visit Monday night with the team doctor Chris Ahmad.

The Yankees, after their 2-0 loss to the Chicago White Sox on Monday night, said that Hughes would have a magnetic resonance imaging test Tuesday.

“Strength tests and everything is fine,” said Hughes, who added he would also have his circulation tested. “But there’s no real definitive test to do just by looking at it.”

Before the game, Hughes spoke to reporters while wearing an ice pack on his shoulder and a solemn expression on his face, the look of a man sick of being stuck in this pitching purgatory, shut down indefinitely but in good health.

Hughes has repeatedly said that he felt fine physically, and that has not changed.

“No pain, nothing like that,” he said in describing the sensation in his shoulder, adding , “If someone hits you in the thigh really hard, and after that it’s just numb — it’s sort of that feeling.”

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12:53 a.m. | Updated

Commissioner Bud Selig, who took control of the Los Angeles Dodgers last Wednesday, appointed Tom Schieffer, the former president of the Texas Rangers, as the franchise’s monitor Monday.

Schieffer, 63, will oversee the team’s day-to-day operations, finance and business, essentially replacing Frank McCourt, the Dodgers’ principal owner since 2004. Schieffer will have the power to approve all team expenditures over $5,000, said two baseball officials who were not authorized to speak publicly.

Selig’s announcement said nothing about what role, if any, McCourt, would play, how long Schieffer would be in charge or if his primary role was to prepare the Dodgers to be sold. Last week McCourt disagreed with Selig’s decision to invoke his “best interests of baseball” powers to take over the Dodgers.

In an interview early Tuesday, Tom Schieffer said it was too early to publicly discuss his duties as the Dodgers’ monitor.

“The main thing is for the focus to be on the field, not on the front office, and to try to get baseball and the Dodgers through a difficult period,” he said.
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BALTIMORE — In a sleepy clubhouse, a burst of excitement came when ESPN showed highlights from the Yankees’ game Saturday night. The image of Joe Girardi standing on the top step of the dugout pumping his fist, in slow motion, after Brett Gardner’s two-run homer in the ninth prompted Nick Swisher to put down his cellphone and seek out his manager — for a hug, a fist bump, something.

“I was upset with what happened last night, and sometimes that’s the best way to make your point,” Girardi said.

The ill feelings lingered Sunday morning, the day after Josh Rupe drilled Russell Martin, who had homered his previous two times up, between the shoulder blades with what may or may not have been a purpose pitch.

Rupe denied Saturday night that there was intent, saying, “I know how to hit a guy when the situation calls for it, and that wasn’t it.”

Martin certainly believed it was, though Girardi, ever diplomatic, stopped short of calling it intentional. “I said it was suspicious,” Girardi said. “I think any person who was to evaluate the situation would say that it was suspicious.”

Girardi was most upset with the location of the pitch — “three inches from his skull” — and said there would have been a different reaction had Rupe hit Martin, say, on the backside. No warnings were issued by the umpires, catching Girardi by surprise, and it will be interesting to see whether Freddy Garcia — or any pitcher following him — takes advantage and tries to retaliate.

Not surprisingly, Girardi deflected questions on that topic, but he did say, “I think it’s important that your players have each other’s backs during a long season.” Then, he added, “As a team, you have to take care of each other.”

When Baltimore Manager Buck Showalter, who said Saturday night that he believed Rupe, was asked about potential retribution, he told reporters: “We’ll deal with it. It’s self-inflicted.”

Jim Rogash/Getty Images Robinson Cano, who homered at Fenway Park two weeks ago, is a career .376 hitter at Camden Yards, the Orioles’ stadium.

BALTIMORE — When it was relayed to Robinson Cano on Saturday that he had the second-highest average at Camden Yards since the ballpark opened in 1992, curiosity overcame him. Wondering who surpassed him, Cano correctly guessed the answer — Ichiro Suzuki of Seattle — and then brushed off his success here.

“Luck,” said Cano, who had a .376 average at the ballpark. “Nothing more than just good luck.”

The explanation is a little more nuanced than that with Cano, an elite hitter who has hit well in practically every American League stadium. At Fenway Park, for instance, Cano is a career .366 hitter, eighth among the 754 hitters with 120 plate appearances since 1946, according to Stats L.L.C.

Some players have said they enjoy hitting at Camden Yards because its green batter’s eye helps them track pitches better, but Cano says he is not one of them.

He entered Saturday’s game hitting 12 points behind Suzuki’s .388, and said, with a laugh, that he hoped to overtake him by the end of the weekend.

Cano’s dominance here dates to the beginning of the 2009 season, when he had six hits in the season-opening series. He had hit safely in 17 of his previous 18 games in Baltimore, batting .521 with 7 homers and 15 runs batted in.

“I’m the kind of person that doesn’t try to think about that kind of stuff,” Cano said. “I send myself positive messages all the time, and it doesn’t matter where we’re playing.”
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