This leads us to one question - when will Alex his his 600th home run, and will it be at Yankee Stadium? With the help of the invaluable baseball-reference, we took a look at A-Rod's illustrious home run history, to try to narrow down a range of dates that he might hit his 600th.
We can be pretty sure that Alex is going to hit 17 HRs in 2010 and reach the milestone - he has done so in every full season in the big leagues. The earliest he ever reached 17 HRs was on May 20th (in 1998 and 2007), and the latest was on August 15th (in 1997). He has hit his 17th HR five times in May, five times in July, three times in June and once in August.
Since dates can fluctuate depending on the way the schedule falls, injuries and regularly scheduled days off, let's take a look at how many games it has taken A-Rod to reach the 17 HR mark in each season:
1996: 69
1997: 106
1998: 45
1999: 51
2000: 57
2001: 46
2002: 52
2003: 69
2004: 68
2005: 47
2006: 76
2007: 42
2008: 65
2009: 57
According to those numbers, on average, Alex Rodriguez hits his 17th home run 61.4 games into the season. For the sake of argument, let's make that 61 games. Taking a quick look at the schedule on Yankees.com, the Yankees' play their 61st scheduled game of 2010 on June 11 at Yankee Stadium against the Houston Astros. Interestingly, that begins a nine game home stand, the Yankees second-longest home stand of the 2010 season.
Tickets don't go on sale until some time in March, but it is probably a good idea to keep an eye on seats for the home stand in the middle of June. The Phillies and Mets games are going to be in high demand regardless of A-Rod's chase, so resale prices are bound to be outrageous. The Astros are probably the least interesting opponent on the Yankees schedule in 2010, but with A-Rod likely closing in on 600 HRs, and the series falling on a weekend, even those games will be tough to get tickets for.
These numbers can be twisted many ways and we're sure some people will take issue with us pointlessly breaking it down in such depth. The bottom line is, Alex's chase for home run glory is going to be a big story during the first half of the 2010 season. Hopefully it won't become a distraction for the team or for Alex. If last year was any indication, we are now witnessing a new A-Rod and it should be a fun ride to 600.
As you can see, things look a little bit different around here, and we're back to the NYYStadiumInsider.com domain. Instead of boring you with the details, we'll just point you toward the updated "about" section and let you read the story of our humble little weblog.
We are now a part of the Bloguin Network, along with fellow Yankees blog Pending Pinstripes (hey look, our blogs even match - we're like blog brothers). The great It Is About The Money, Stupid recently had to switch off of the network due to their ESPN affiliation which lined up perfectly for us to come into the fold.
Before anyone asks, this move has everything to do with presenting our material in the most visually appealing way possible and nothing to do with money. By giving up our independent status, we're actually giving up potential ad revenue (since a large chunk of that will now go toward Bloguin). Since we don't have much time to put into the design of the blog, the free design and backend support that Bloguin offered was the deciding factor. They're also building a nice little community of blogs around here that we're proud to be a part of. Feel free to check out the widget on the sidebar which contains links to all of the different Bloguin blogs.
Speaking of navigation, you will notice that navigational layout is similar to what we had over at New Stadium Insider. The same tabs are on the navbar and the same widgets are on the sidebar. We'll also be automatically forwarding the NewStadiumInsider.com url, so you'll automatically find your way here. Due to errors during the import process, we were unable to carry the old posts from blogger over here, but we have an "old site" tab for anything you want to reference. http://newstadiuminsider.blogspot.com will also remain active, so those hyperlinks will still exist.
The RSS feed has changed, so be sure to update your readers with the new feed. We're still at the same place on Twitter, and we're sure you know where to find us.
As of now, I remain as the only author of NYY Stadium Insider. My brother Nick will probably contribute on occasion and we'll look to strategically add like-minded individuals into the fold. I'd love to promise a ton of content heading into the spring like I did last year. Unfortunately, work is still crazy, and I am preparing to get married in June. Just check back regularly and hopefully we'll have some good stuff to offer. Just know that the scope of the blog hasn't changed one bit - we'll never become a news aggregating blog. We pride ourselves on producing original content within our micro-niche and that will continue until we retire from blogging completely.
Thanks again to everyone for reading, and be sure to spread the word about the switch!
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