The Season in Review: How Close Robinson Cano Came to the Rare Three-Pi

English: 1933 Goudey card of Pie Traynor of the Pittsburgh Pirates #22. PD-not-renewed. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

For the second year in a row, Seattle second sacker Robinson Cano "hit for Pi," as baseball stat geeks describe it. That is, his batting average was .314, spot on (save for the inconvenient placement of the decimal) the glorious mathematical constant that has given top mathematicians joy of the circle since the Great Pyramid of Giza.

What you probably missed was that in 2012 Cano  hit .313, only a single base hit short of a record breaking three Pi's in a row, or a "bakery window" as New Yorker baseball writer Roger Angell has whimsically described it.

Ironically, Hall of Famer and Pittsburgh ironman Harold Joseph (Pie) Traynor never "squared the circle," as baseball old-timers called it. The closest he came was in 1926 when he hit .320.