Low & Outside: AL Notes

Meet Ichiro Suzuki, millennium man.

Over the weekend, the Seattle rightfielder crossed the plate for his 1,000 time, becoming the eighth-fastest active player - and third Mariner ever - to reach the mark.

Then for good measure, he made it 1,001 in Sunday's 9-4 home loss to the Angels.

The day before, in the fifth, also against the Angels, he doubled for his second hit, then scored on Franklin Gutierrez's RBI groundout. The crowd stood and chanted "I-chi-ro!" until he emerged from the dugout to tip his cap.

"Well, that's part of my job, to score runs as a leadoff hitter," he said through an interpreter.

Suzuki has a majors-best 29 multi-hit games.

The bad news Saturday was the Angels shellacked the Mariners anyway, 11-2. The worse news was Safeco Field blared the music of MC Hammer and others of his era to commemorate Seattle's first playoff season in 1995.

Now that Garrett Wittels of Florida International University has seen his hitting streak end - for this season - at 56 games, another 56-game stand comes to mind.

Joe DiMaggio's run for the Yankees in 1941 should be safe in the majors for some time to come - maybe even in perpetuity. Second place goes all the way back to the Victorian Era for 45 by the Baltimore Orioles' Willie Keeler in 1896-97. The closest in the modern era is the Cincinnati Reds' Pete Rose with 44 in 1978.

The Yankee Clipper's streak captivated the nation. Radio shows were interrupted with "DiMag" bulletins, and Congress hired a page to carry dispatches to the floor.

The day it ended, July 17, 1941, the cabbie driving DiMaggio to the Cleveland Indians' stadium told him he thought the streak would end that day, we learn from baseball-almanac.com.

Many years later, DiMaggio told of a later encounter with the same man:

"Now this is over 30 years later, and the guy said he was that cab driver. He apologized [for the prediction], and he was serious. I felt awful. He might have been spending his whole life thinking he had jinxed me, but I told him he hadn't. My number was up."

Ford Frick, commissioner of Major League Baseball from 1951 to 1965, called DiMaggio's streak one of the unbeatable marks in baseball history.

Since Charlie Hustle's run ended 12 short of the mark 32 years ago - when DiMaggio had moved on to his Mr. Coffee gig - and no one else has been crowding him since then, Frick appears to have been prophetic.

Mariners starter Doug Fister is on the 15-day DL with a sore right pitching shoulder. . . . Yankees catcher Jorge Posada, a designated hitter since coming off the DL last week, could begin catching drills this week . . . Rangers slugger Josh Hamilton is out of the starting lineup after getting a cortisone injection in his right knee.