2,000,000 strikeouts

During yesterday's Kansas City Royals at Cleveland Indians Major League game, Indians pitcher Danny Salazar struck out Royals' Norichika Aoki swinging with a 98-mph fastball in the bottom of the 7th inning, his 7th, and last, strikeout of the game. This was the last pitch of a quality outing for Salazar, but he did something much more important than help the Tribe win. With that strikeout, he helped accomplish a historic feat: the 2 millionth strikeout in Major League history!

Danny Salazar

It took until 1976 (beginning in 1876) for 1,000,000 strikeouts to happen, but the pace has picked up since then. You can thank strikeout king, Nolan Ryan, for 5,714 of those Ks. That works out to about one in every 350 of those 2,000,000 belonging to the Ryan Express.

Stadium Dimensions

The following image was taken from visual.ly, and it shows you the variance in different ball park dimensions. As the site explains, unlike other professional sports, baseball games are played on fields that vary in size from park to park, since the only rules on size of field regulate only the location and height of the pitchers mound and the distance between bases. Thus, no two baseball stadiums are alike!

Baseball And Disney

We ran across a short YouTube video describing Disney's love affair with America's pastime. It's worth a view.

World's Highest Catch

In 1939, San Francisco Seals catcher Joe Sprinz attempted to set a Guinness World Record at that year's World's Fair by catching a baseball which would be dropped from a Goodyear blimp, a good 800 feet above ground. It seems that everyone forgot about a little thing we like to call physics, involving gravity and terminal velocity.

Sprinz missed the first four balls dropped. The got a good angle on the fifth one, and seemed destined to make the catch. It's estimated that by the time the ball hit Sprinz glove, it was traveling around 150 miles an hour. The force of the ball caused his glove to slam into his face, fracturing his jaw and knocking out five teeth in the process.