When Ichiro Suzuki gets a shipment of new bats, he gives them the Ichiro test.

“He has two sets of bats,” Tony Attanasio, Suzuki’s long-time agent, related this week. “He’ll take a bat and hit the barrel of the bat with his finger nail and listen to it. Then he’ll put that bat aside. He does that with every one of the bats. He puts some of the bats on his left-hand side, some on the right-hand side. The bats are different.”

Ichiro uses one set of bats, the ones he pronounces good, in games. He gives away the others when a player asks him for a bat.

“It’s like people who can tell the difference in wine glasses,” Attanasio said. “It’s the same concept as the tuning fork. He hears the difference in the sound of the bats.”

Attanasio said Mizuno, the Japanese company that makes Ichiro’s bats, has a forest of trees dedicated to his bats.

Through Wednesday, Suzuki’s bats had produced …

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R.A. Dickey is the best, most recent example of this class of pitchers, veterans who have worked for a succession of teams and are available as free agents to anyone who needs pitching but who are nevertheless not hotly pursued.

Dickey, who was 35 years old and had pitched for three major league teams, was a free agent after the 2009 season when the New York Mets signed him because their general manager, Omar Minaya, knew him from their days in Texas.

In his third season with the Mets, the knuckleballing Dickey won 20 games and the National League Cy Young award.

Bartolo Colon, Jason Marquis, Francisco Liriano and Scott Feldman may not win a Cy Young award this year, but they are …

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As Major League Baseball reached the exaggerated benchmark of July 4 this week, the season had produced some intriguing developments. Which of these are the most impressive and least expected?

* The Pirates in first place in the National League Central with the best won-lost record in majors (52-31).
* The Red Sox, who finished last last season, leading the American League East most of the season, every day since May 27, with the best record in league (51-34).
* Four of five N.L. West teams have losing records. First-place Arizona barely has a winning record (43-41).
* The Dodgers, with an N.L. record $216 million payroll, wallowing in last place for eight weeks until Tuesday. On July 4 they were tied for second, only 2 ½ games from first.
* The Nationals, a pre-season favorite, struggling to stay above .500.
* The Tigers, a pre-season favorite to win perhaps everything, struggling to hold onto A.L. Central lead.
* The Marlins and the Astros compete for recognition as the majors’ worst team.
* Yasiel Puig, a Cuban dynamo, tears up the N.L. in his first month in the majors, raising legitimate questions about Dodgers’ delayed call-up while they languished in last.
* Miguel Cabrera of Detroit threatens to win his second successive Triple Crown, leading the A.L. in batting average (.364) and runs batted in (85) but Chris Davis of Baltimore looms large in his way, ahead of him in home runs (32-26) and second in hitting (.331) and r.b.i. (83).
* The Tigers’ Max Scherzer, the first pitcher to mount a 13-0 record since Roger Clemens in 1986, leads an impressive array of pitchers, including Patrick Corbin of Arizona (9-1), the Rays’ Matt Moore (11-3), the Mets’ Matt Harvey (7-2), Jordan Zimmerman of the Nationals (12-3), Boston’s Clay Buccholz, the Cardinals’ Adam Wainwright (11-5) and Lance Lynn (all 10-3) and the Pirates’ Gerrit Cole, winner of all four of his starts after his delayed call-up.

For as long as I remember July 4 was cited as a telltale date on the baseball calendar. Teams in first place that day, the theory went, would …

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