Today’s featured post comes from Bob Fleishman:

Bob’s take: Has anybody noticed that Brian Roberts is on track to hit 60 doubles this season?

Only 6 others in the history of Major League Baseball have done that, and no one since 1936!!. Earl Webb holds the record with 67 doubles - and of the other 5, 4 are Hall of Famers - Paul Waner, Charlie Gehringer, Hank Greenberg and Joe Medwick. The last player to come close to 60 doubles was Todd Helton in 2000 with 59.

Brian looks like he's going into another one of his hot streaks the last few days, so it would be interesting if he can get the remaining 20 (or more) in his last 52 games.

My take: Great observations and thanks for looking all that up. The only thing you didn’t do was the calculation to show the pace he’s on, which is easy enough (especially when every laptop has a calculator). Brian’s 40 doubles in 110 games works out to 58.9 over a 162-game season. Of course, he has played in only 107 of the Orioles 110 games, but using the bulk numbers is legit, since there’s no way to predict how many more days off he’ll get this year.

Will he get there? The odds are probably against it, since the Orioles have been on something of an offensive roll for the past couple of months. If the rest of the team slows down at the plate over the final two months – which is a decent bet -- that could cost Roberts at-bats at the end of games. But I’m not counting him out. That would be quite an achievement and Brian is quite a player.