Alex Rodriguez is lurching toward more and more home run milestones, and it's glorious. His team wants him to fall into a pit. Fans around the game want him to retire. Yet he keeps hitting dingers and pissing people off. I'm not going to pretend that A-Rod is anything but a weirdo -- and that's the best-case scenario -- but I do enjoy when overly serious people get pissed off. So this is going to be fun.

Except, as much as I would enjoy the grumbling of an annoyed country as Rodriguez approached 763 home runs, I"m not enough of a misanthrope to prefer that scenario to one where everyone is so danged into it, like McGwire and Sosa in 1998. The baseball-loving world coming together to enjoy a record might -- just might -- be preferable to the baseball-loving world tearing each other apart in bilious fits of rage. Barely.

Which milestones, records, and chases would be the best to follow, though? Here are nine of the best, ranked in the order of preference. Note that some of these are arbitrary milestones because there are more than a few unbreakable pitching records from baseball's early days. For about 30 years, managers would arrive before the game and make the baseball out of whatever they could find around the park. Dirt, twigs, clam shells, fingernails, whatever. They would scoop it all into a ball and soak it in buttermilk for an hour. Those baseballs didn't travel very well. Also, the pitchers threw 489 innings every season. The records set back then aren't relevant to our interests.

A correct, completely inarguable power ranking of milestones, records, and chases:

9. 263 hits

You might have known this number off the top of your head. I didn't. I had to look it up, which says something. It's not a magic number, something you bounced around in your head as a kid while you stared at baseball cards. Plus, it was broken recently, by a player who's still active. The relative recency takes some of the allure away.

It's still a cool record. It's still a basic part of enjoying baseball, watching the players on your team hit a ball where the fielders can't catch it. Ichiro has it now, and if Jose Altuve threatens the mark, it'll be a thrilling, compelling chase. I wrote an ode to Altuve's batting average here, and it all applies to 263 hits, too:

Guys like Ichiro and Gwynn were freaks, though. If you think of a player getting a hit as a happy-fun event, those guys were each a waterfall of happy-fun events. They were peerless in their ability to get a hit. Fans had extraordinarily high expectations every time they came to the plate, and they lived up to those expectations more than anyone else on the field.

This doesn't rank last because it wouldn't be a fun chase. It ranks last because other chases would be even better.

8. 384 strikeouts

Strikeouts keep going up, but we aren't likely to see a 300-strikeout pitcher soon. Pitchers just don't throw enough innings.

That means the magic combination of power, stuff, and command that could challenge Nolan Ryan's modern strikeout record would be implausibly watchable. It couldn't come in 300-plus innings (with outings that bordered on 200 pitches at time, like Ryan), so it would have to be a unique, historic anomaly. A total freak. The kind of pitcher who could threaten with Gibson's ERA mark in 1968. Which we'll get to.

7. 4,257 hits

This is like the 763 home run mark, except this one bugs me more. Barry Bonds almost certainly put things in his body that he shouldn't have, things that other players were unwilling to take, and things that players throughout history didn't get a chance to take (even if more than a few of them totally would have). But he hit those dingers as a player who was on his team because he made his team better. There was no doubt about that, and even in his final season, he was still one of the most feared hitters in baseball history.

Pete Rose was a manager who kept writing his name into the lineup so he could get this record. In his final 1,749 plate appearances, he hit .256/.349/.305 with two homers. While the OBP was solid, he couldn't run or field, and he was a net negative for his team for most of his last seven seasons.

That's kind of how the chase for 4,257 would have to be, though. It would have to be a player who was clearly a shell of what he used to be, lasting long past the point of being useful. Even if you folded Ichiro's NPB hits into his career totals in MLB, he would still need to get hundreds of at-bats for a good team that shouldn't be willing to give him those at-bats. Unless we see some sort of hyper-hitter who threatens the mark before turning 40, this is a chase that will involve decline and a starting job of questionable merit.

(It would also be completely exciting, but we're just splitting hairs, here.)

6. 1.11 ERA

Bob Gibson's 1968 mark isn't a record. Technically, Tim Keefe's 0.86 ERA for the Troy Trojans in 1880 is the record, even though he appeared in just 12 games (out of 83). If you don't want to include that one, Dutch Leonard had a 0.96 ERA in 224 innings in 1914 (and finished 16th in the MVP voting, right behind two dudes with a sub-.600 OPS ). You can't relate to those numbers.

Gibson, though, did his work in the modern era. In the pitcher-friendliest season of the last 75 years, mind you, but it's still a milestone that's easier to embrace. Here's what Gibson's season looked like:

34 starts

26 complete games

two starts with four earned runs

five starts with three ER

three starts with two ER

nine starts with one ER

15 starts with zero ER

That's what it takes to have an ERA of 1.12. Considering that it would be unlikely for anyone to top 300 innings again, that distribution would have to be even more skewed in favor of the one- and zero-run outings. Think of how brilliant Clayton Kershaw was last year. He won the Cy Young and MVP, deservedly so. He would have needed 115 more scoreless innings to pass Gibson.

Now imagine what an event every fifth day would be with a pitcher like that. I can't. It's something so ludicrous, so foreign, that we can think about it only in abstract terms. It would be one of the best chases possible.

5. .400 batting average

This wouldn't be a record, just a nice round number that has a lot to do with our fascination with 10s and 100s. It also might not happen again. If you have 10 minutes or so, you can check out what evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould has to say about it:

You could also read Gould's essay, too. Note that when searching for that essay, the results were filled with baseball nerds and scientists who were very mad at Gould for reasons I'm too dumb to understand, but the overarching point still holds. It's harder for hitters to hit .400 these days. Fielders are better. Fields are manicured properly. Pitchers throw too hard.

That doesn't mean that .400 is impossible, though. It doesn't seem like an impossible mesh of luck and talent to get 40 hits out of every 100 at-bats instead of 36 out of every 100, which we saw just last year. If it seems like an arbitrary mark to care about, well, welcome to baseball. This whole mess is arbitrary.

4. 763 home runs

Like Ichiro's hits mark, this one suffers just a bit from recency fatigue. Barry Bonds just set the record, and while it was an exciting pursuit, the extracurricular nonsense prevented it from being a beloved spectacle. There weren't any long-hairs running on the field in a celebration that's burned into our mind. If Alex Rodriguez does it, there probably won't be an iconic moment, either, other than "Hey, he set the record. Far out."

The Internet comments, though, would be glorious. It is something to root for.

Don't think of A-Rod specifically, then. Think of Giancarlo Stanton lasting for 12 more years, avoiding all the bear traps of age. Think of Kris Bryant turning into something more than the hype. Think of Joey Gallo lasting two decades and helping Rangers fans turn their recent history into distant history. A hitter who can hit 763 home runs would be a testament to talent and longevity -- not only an extraordinary hitter, but someone who doesn't make us curse the capriciousness of baseball and all of the lurking injuries.

It's kind of hard to hit 763 home runs, you know.

3. 74 home runs

You know what a 24-homer hitter is? He's a power hitter. You would bat a feller like that in the middle of the order. Do you know what a 50-homer hitter is? He's one of the game's very best power hitters, a freak.

To break Bonds's single season record, a hitter would have to be both of those. He would have to be a middle-of-the-order slugger standing on the shoulders of an MVP candidate, wearing a trench coat and trying to get into an X-rated movie. It would be a hitter who could swat a dinger about every other day, on average, avoiding slumps and dealing with pitchers who would rather walk him.

I watched Bonds in 2001. I still don't know how it happened. This means I'm especially curious to watch it again, especially as someone who grew up unable to comprehend 61 homers.

2. 131 stolen bases

There were 66 games in 1982 in which Rickey Henderson didn't steal a base. That means he sure packed a helluva lot of steals into the other 96. This might be the most achievable of any of these records, really. All it takes is the right combo of speed, on-base ability, and crazy manager.

Except it would have to be insane speed, ludicrous on-base ability, and a completely daffy manager. Or maybe focusing on the manager is the wrong idea -- maybe the focus should be on the owners, who would enjoy the chase in terms of ticket sales.

The highest SB mark since 1990 is 78 from Marquis Grissom in 1992, though. That's just over half of what it would take to get the record from Henderson, and maybe like the .400 hitter, maybe catchers are just too good now. Maybe pitchers and slide-steps have made it too hard for anyone to break 100 steals these days, much less 130.

This article isn't about assessing the likelihood that these marks will fall. This is about the what if that would come with a chase. And if the magic player showed up who could legitimately threaten 130 steals, he could make a baseball season compelling all by himself. The game might be sinking into the morass of pitching right now, but if the upside is more small ball -- specifically, dudes stealing bases whenever they got the chance, even when everyone watching the game knows they're going to try -- it might even be worth it.

1. 57-game hitting streak

This is pure, unfiltered baseball. It's the randomness of extraordinary fortune combined with extraordinary talent, and it would be an easily identifiable mark for the general public to seize onto. It would create a condensed version of the McGwire-Sosa mania, in which people who didn't care about baseball stopped what they were doing every day to check in on what's happening with baseball. Unlike the 74-dinger chase, this is something that had a binary outcome -- and increased tension -- attached to every game. There would be eighth-inning, do-or-die at-bats. There would be extra-innings reprieves from the governor.

Mostly, though, there would be a lot of hits. This is one of the unbreakable records, supposedly. It probably isn't going to fall in our lifetime, and all that stuff about improved fielding applies here, too.

Baseball doesn't like it when you tell it the odds, though. Never tell it the odds. All I know is that it would be completely bananas to follow someone with a 50-game hitting streak, and that it would be even more bananas to follow someone with a 51-game hitting streak. Then 52 ... 53 ... 54 ... the pressure, attention, and drama increasing exponentially with each successful hurdle ...

That's the dream, the impossible dream. As is, we'll have to settle for A-Rod's carnival of annoyed Americans in the near future. Unless Jose Altuve decides to hit .400 and steal 141 bases. Everyone throw a penny down the well and focus on the same damned thing.