John Olerud notched his 2000th hit tonight. The hit got some play at the baseball sites. It wasn't big news and Olerud's career won't be considered big news either. He had one "career" season in 1993 when he flirted with .400 for a large part of the year and ended up hitting .363 with 54 doubles, 24 homeruns and a .476 OBP. The rest of his career (except for 1998 when he hit .354) has been what people would call, "steady." There would be little mention of him as a potential Hall of Famer.

But Olerud is one of those unsung players. A few stats can't tell the full picture. Sure, he has a lifetime batting average of .299 and a remarkable lifetime OBP of .403. You have to put all of his stats together to get the picture that Olerud has always done one simple thing: He's always made his team better.

One way he's done that is with his fielding. He doesn't make the highlight shows with flashy diving stops (though he'll make a few). What he does is make all of his infielding teammates better. Back in his Toronto days, when they had Tony Fernandez at shortstop, Fernandez was the whiz kid and a sensation. Olerud helped make that happen. I know as I watched nearly all of those games. Fernandez never duplicated those days, though he was a good player.

Olerud then went to the Mets and the last year that he was there, the Mets set a major league record for the fewest errors. Olerud somehow gives his infielders confidence that whatever they throw over there, he'll find a way to catch. The biggest telling factor for those Mets is how badly their infield defense collapsed when Olerud went to Seattle and Zeile took over as Mets first baseman (no knock on Zeile).

Now he is with Seattle and it's not an accident that the Mariners are touted for their first class, high powered defense. What a surprise that the defense is anchored by John Olerud at first base.


I'll give you my National League AllStar pitchers tomorrow. You can already mark down that Kevin Brown is going to be on my list.