"Records"

Ichiro and A-Rod each set records last night:

Seattle Mariners outfielder Suzuki recorded his eighth straight 200-hit season to equal a Major League Baseball record that has stood for over a century . . . Meanwhile, in New York, Alex Rodriguez reached another significant milestone when he became the first Major League player to hit 35 home runs in 11 consecutive seasons.

As a kid who grew up reading the Guinness book every year, I've always thought that "records" required some sort of unusual or spectacular dimension. Sports records counted, but only the really memorable ones like Aaron's (or Oh's, if you read Guinness) home run record or Jim Marshall's consecutive games streak.

The things more squarely in my mind as "records" were freaky things. Robert Wadlow was a record. The guy who put hundreds of cigarettes in his mouth at once was definitely a record. Fattest twins was borderline, but qualified in my mind as just spectacular enough. Most anything that Evel Knievel did counted too. Maybe the point of all of this is that motorcycles are a necessary prerequisite for records in my mind.

Anyway, it strikes me that for feats such as Ichiro's and A-Rods -- accomplishments of a steady and workmanlike nature that will be utterly forgotten until the next guy comes along and breaks it -- we need a word with less of the "oh wow" connotations than "record." They aren't milestones, really, but the slow and regular and unspectacular nature of that word gets closer to what they each accomplished than "record" does.

I hereby deputize Joe Posnanski to come up with a word for these sorts of feats. He's really good at that sort of thing.

UPDATE: Leave it to a writing scholar. Sara K has moved that we call such feats "meh-cords" and the motion has been seconded. I consider it passed, and that is how they shall henceforth be known.