As a baseball writer, during the course of a long season you often find yourself faced with a little numerical quandary that presents you with the following choices:

1. Ignore it
2. Blow it off
3. Spend way too much time researching the answer

Rarely do you get past Nos. 1 and 2. But some are compelling enough to generate the momentum of curiosity required to ferret out something half-worthwhile. Here are five that made their way onto my radar screen in the past month:

Battering Bonds
It's one thing to be leading the league in slugging and on-base percentage, let alone batting. But Barry Bonds is simply obliterating the rest of major-league hitters -- so much so that he could set a major-league record for margin of victory in the newly prestigious OPS race.

Bonds had a 1.374 OPS entering the week, with Sammy Sosa running a distant second at 1.061 among all other major-league hitters. That 313-point differential would be the largest ever, and by far the most since that Babe Ruth character made chicks dig the longball. The only six times the difference has been as much as even 200 points:

Year	Winner	Runner-Up	Diff.
1920	Babe Ruth, 1.379	George Sisler, 1.082	.297
1926	Babe Ruth, 1.253	Heinie Manush, .985	.268
1921	Babe Ruth, 1.359	Rogers Hornsby, 1.097	.262
1942	Ted Williams, 1.147	Charlie Keller, .930	.217
2001	Barry Bonds , 1.379	Sammy Sosa, 1.174	.205
1941	Ted Williams, 1.286	Joe DiMaggio, 1.083	.203

One other Bonds note: He's burned through just 38 strikeouts to hit his 33 home runs, amazingly against today's grain. If he somehow cuts down his whiffs even more he could finish with more homers than strikeouts -- something that hasn't been done by a 30-homer hitter since Ted Kluszewski (35 homers, 31 whiffs) and Yogi Berra (30, 29) in 1956.

Ichi-rolls along
Of all the amazing things Ichiro does, perhaps this is the most so: He could actually win a batting title this season with an average lower than his career mark.

It's true. After winning the AL crown as a rookie last year at .350, he currently leads again at .344. If Mike Sweeney (.355) and his bad back slump or can't get enough plate appearances the rest of the way, Ichiro will probably become just the 10th player ever to be so good as to win a batting title in what could be termed an off year, average-wise. (Even Carl Yastrzemski's .301 average in 1968 was higher than his career mark of .298 entering that season.) Of course it helps when you enter the league in your prime, but that's still pretty cool. The official list:

Player	Title	Season	Career*
Nap Lajoie	1903 AL	.355	.363
Elmer Flick	1905 AL	.306	.321
Honus Wagner	1906 NL	.339	.349
Ty Cobb	1908 AL	.3236	.3244
Honus Wagner	1909 NL	.339	.346
Honus Wagner	1911 NL	.334	.343
Ty Cobb	1914 AL	.3681	.3682
Ted Williams	1947 AL	.343	.353
Stan Musial	1950 NL	.3459	.3465
Stan Musial	1952 NL	.336	.347
Ted Williams	1958 AL	.328	.350
Tony Oliva	1964 AL	.323	.438
Tony Oliva	1965 AL	.321	.326
Rod Carew	1978 AL	.333	.335
Tony Gwynn	1988 NL	.313	.335

* Lifetime average entering that season

The most comparable case in this group to Ichiro -- who hit .353 in his nine Japanese League seasons -- is probably Tony Oliva, who thanks to hitting 7-for-16 in two brief callups in 1962 and 1963 entered his rookie year of 1964 with the head start of a .438 lifetime average. He won the batting title that first full season at .323, putting his lifetime mark at .326, then followed up with another title by hitting a slightly less .321.

Speaking of American League batting averages this year, have you noticed while perusing the leaders that the No. 10 guy, often Torii Hunter, has often been hitting around .307 or .308? That's pretty low -- so low, in fact, that the No. 10 hitter in the AL hasn't been below .310 since 1992, when Mike Bordick brought up the Top 10 rear at .300. 1992 was the last year of relatively down offense before hitting began to explode to its current levels.

A walk's as good as ... well, not this
Contrived stat alert: We all know about how exclusive the 40-40 club is. Only Jose Canseco (1988), Barry Bonds (1996) and Alex Rodriguez (1998) belong. But Alfonso Soriano is on his way to forging a whole new group for just himself. No player in big-league history ever has had 40 homers, 40 steals and 40 doubles in the same year. Soriano (29 homers, 31 steals and 41 doubles already entering the week) is on pace to do it. He's already just a home run away from joining the 30-30-30 club, in which there are just 25 members.

How good is Soriano at these skills? Among all players in the history of the game who posted at least 20 in each category in one season, he could post the highest total in those categories added together -- he's on pace for 140 total, which would rank second all-time. (And with many fewer stolen bases, by far the least valuable skill of the three, than most other guys.) The top 10 among the 20-20-20 club:

Player	Year	HR	SB	2B	Total
R. Henderson	1986	28	87	31	146
R. Henderson	1985	24	80	28	132
Joe Morgan	1973	26	67	35	128
Larry Walker	1997	49	33	46	128
R. Henderson	1990	28	33	65	126
A. Rodriguez	1998	42	35	46	123
C. Biggio	1998	20	50	51	121
H. Johnson	1989	36	41	41	118
Joe Morgan	1976	27	60	30	117
Barry Bonds	1990	33	52	32	117

Making the criteria more strict -- at least 30 in each category -- leaves Soriano with a great chance to catch Walker's all-time record of 128.

Atlanta's peach of a lead
The Elias Sports Bureau reports that the Braves' bullpen ERA, currently at 2.36, could become the lowest in the majors since the 1968 Dodgers (2.16). That has helped the team mount a shocking, 18-game lead in the NL East. Could Atlanta finish with the highest division lead since the leagues split in 1969?

Probably not -- the Indians won the AL Central by a whopping 30 games over the Royals in 1995. (Which was a short season, making it even more amazing.) But Atlanta still is on pace to win the division by around 25 games, which would place second all-time. Division winners' final margins of victory of 20 games or more:

Division	Winner	Lead	Runner-Up
1995 AL Central	Indians	30	Royals
1998 AL East	Yankees	22	Red Sox
1986 NL East	Mets	21½	Phillies
1999 AL Central	Indians	21½	White Sox
1995 NL East	Braves	21	Mets
1975 NL West	Reds	20	Dodgers
1983 AL West	White Sox	20	Royals

No joke required -- it's Tampa, after all
What would an article like this be without some measure of the Devil Rays' ineptitude? How's this -- they're less than two months away from doing something even the historically lowly Cubs and Indians have never done in their dowdy century-long histories. That is, lose at least 90 games five years in a row.

In fact, since the longer 162-game schedule made losing 90 even easier to do starting in 1961, only five teams have made it that far five straight years, four of them expansion franchises:

Team	Streak	Years
Astros	7	1962-68
Padres	7	1969-75
Mets	6	1962-67
Braves	5	1975-79
Senators	5	1961-65

For those of you wondering, the all-time record for consecutive 90-loss seasons is 10, by the 1936-45 Philadelphia Phillies. The Yankees, meanwhile, have never done it more than two years in a row in their 100 seasons.

Alan Schwarz is the Senior Writer of Baseball America magazine and a regular contributor to ESPN.com.