Ichiro Suzuki and Barry Bonds are leading their respective leagues in batting and are now within 4 points of each other, but they are doing it in very different ways.

Ichiro, as I pointed out and got waylaid by M's fans, is doing it by relying heavily on singles, perhaps at a record-setting pace.

Meanwhile, Bonds may be having his best offensive season to date, and therefore possibly the best offensive season ever. His great batting average may be the least impressive of his ratios. His current on-base percentage is .608. No batter has ever had an OBP over .600 over a full season in major-league history. He holds the record with a .582 OBP in 2002. No other batter in history is within 50 points of him (Ted Williams had a .553 OBP in 1941). This is, of course, helped greatly by his record-setting base on balls pace. Right now he is 13 walks behind the (i.e., his) single-season walk record (198 in 2002). He is on pace to walk 225 times this year. No other batter in baseball history would be within 50 walks of that record (Babe Ruth's 170 in 1923 is the best non-Bonds total).

His slugging percentage (.821) would rank fourth all-time. Bonds has slugged over 1.000 for a month twice (April and August).

His OPS is 1.429. Its over 40 points better than the current record (1.387) that he set in 2002. His OPS against lefties is 550 points higher than against right-handers, and yet his OPS vs. right-handers would rank fourth in the majors, a few points behind Albert Pujols, one of the few men mentioned along with Bonds as a potential MVP candidate.

Barring injury, Bonds will blaze past 700 home runs this season, and even though he is 40, we could conceivably see him pass Aaron by the end of next year, at which point we may be discussing the odds of him reaching 800 home runs and then Sadaharu Oh's professional home run record (868).

Here are Bonds's 2004 splits:

Ichiro is on pace to collect 265 hits, eight more than George Sisler's single-season record. What's so remarkable about his season is that he started off so slowly and still has a good chance to break the hits record. He also has reversed his trend to slump in the second half. As a matter of fact, if you combine his first half stats in 2003 and his second half stats this year, you get a pretty good season. Here are the better halves of the last two seasons and the worse halves, both combined. It's quite a difference:

So Ichiro and Bonds are both having remarkable seasons for different reasons. Together as potential batting champs, they are remarkably at different ends of the hits spectrum. While Ichiro is on pace to set the single-season record, Bonds may have one of the lowest hit totals for a batting champ ever. He has 113 hits right now and projects to 137 for the season.

Here are all the batting champs with 137 or fewer hits in a season all time:

Note that a number of these champs (demarcated by an +) won their titles in an era in which the rules to qualify for the title were different and they wouldn’t win under today's rules. Also, Ted Williams' 1954 season is listed (with an asterisk) because under today's rules he would have won the title (even though Bobby Avila has the title in the record books). Williams walked too often and back then qualification was based on your at-bats total.

One last tangent: here are all the batting champs how would lose their titles if today's rules were in force. I encourage MLB to do as they did with no-hitters, go back and drop the batting titles that were given to men who just had to play in either 60% of their team's games or 100 games for a season. Believe me, we won't miss them. (Note: the adjusted batting average reflects the current rule of adding in hitless at-bats to bring the batter's plate appearance total to the minimum):

One final note, though Williams should have won the title in 1954, many point to his 1955 season as another example of his being screwed over by the lousy qualification rules. Actually, his plate appearance total for that year is well below the minimum (by 60). His .356 becomes an adjusted average of .300, forty points behind Al Kaline.