Chasing History

Barry Bonds. The name alone conjures so many different feelings in different peoples minds. And this post has nothing to do with him.

No, despite the fact that we've had a 300 game winner (Tom Glavine), 3 probable Hall Of Famers (Bonds, Frank Thomas, and ARod) hit homer milestones, and 1 more reach 3000 hits (Craig Biggio), this post is about something completely different.

(So it's Biggio's historic pursuit of getting hit a bunch of times? Nope, I'll leave that to Plunk Biggio)

Nope, we're here to talk today about the heroic pursuit of Jim Rice's GIDP records by Nationals 3B Ryan Zimmerman. Zimmerman, who has grounded into 24 double plays so far this year, is 11 shy of reaching the rarefied air that only Rice has reached: 35 double plays in a season.

You'd think that with the proliferation of runners in the last 15 years, we'd have more players challenging this record, but there have been only 3 players to reach 30 GIDP's in that time span: Ben Grieve, Brad Ausmus, and surprisingly enough, Ivan Rodriguez in his MVP season.

With only a month left to play, it's unlikely that Zimmerman will play enough to catch Jim Rice; he'd need a historically bad month. But, he could very easily join that 30 GIDP club, which is quite a feat in it's own right. I encourage Nationals fans to root for this to happen; you might as well get some mileage out of your lousy season. Manny Acta probably deserves manager of the year for keeping you from losing 100 games, but if you had lost 100 games, you'd at least be a uniquely crappy club from the rest of the crappy NL clubs.