Robbie Alomar days

It's Robbie Alomar days until Opening Day

Here's the funny thing to me about Robbie Alomar. You look at his Baseball-Reference page and it's almost entirely devoid of bold numbers. On B-R bold numbers indicate that a player led the league in that statistic for that season. There were only two seasons in which Robbie led the league in anything: in 1989 he led in plate appearances (702) and sacrifice hits (17), and in 1999 he led in runs (138), and sacrifice flies (13).

I looked at the players with the most career hits as second basemen. Robbie is sixth on that list. Each of the others in the top 9 led the league in meaningful numbers multiple times over the course of their career.

I know Robbie played some serious defense and that contributed a lot to his value. I'm not discounting any of that. I'm simply saying I'm surprised.

Robbie hit second most of his career. He'd frequently hit third too, and occasionally lead off. He didn't hit cleanup very often, only in 13 games and for 48 plate appearances. He hit only one home run in this whole career from the cleanup spot. I wondered what the circumstances were so I looked them up.

It was June 25, 1998 and Robbie was playing for the Orioles in an unholy game against the Mets at Shea. The Orioles lineup was:

1. Brady Anderson CF
2. Joe Carter RF
3. Rafael Palmeiro 1B
4. Alomar 2B
5. BJ Surhoff LF
6. Cal Ripken, Jr. 3B
7. Lenny Webster C
8. Mike Bordick SS
9. Pitcher

That day and the very next day against the Expos were the only two games that entire season they lined up that way. I can't figure out why Robbie would bad cleanup among all those sluggers. It wasn't his birthday, he didn't have otherworldly splits against the opposing pitchers. The Orioles were 37-42 at the time, maybe manager Ray Miller was just trying to shake things up.

In baseball, sometimes things like that work.

And sometimes they don't. The Os lost their third game in a row on their way to an 8-game losing streak.

I'd still like to know why he hit cleanup those two games.