Basestealing goes in and out of style, though. In the 1940s and 1950s they didn’t steal bases much at all. In 1950, 77 was the National League leader in steals… **for an entire team. ** In fact, in the 1950s, there was not a single National League team that stole 100 bases in a season. The AL had only one franchise break a hundred, the White Sox from 1957 to 1959, and then only barely.
Then basestealing came back into style, and now it’s kind of back down again though not like it was in the 1950s. So it’s not impossible it could come back in a big way. You never know. Nothing about the way baseball is played makes it impossible to steal many bases.
Errors in a career and in a single season: Herman Long owns or shares both records (1096 career errors, 122 in a season). Better field conditions, better gloves, and an intolerance for poor defensive skills make these records unbreakable.
One more tidbit about Hederson’s single season record is that he announced at the beginning of the season that he was attempting to break the record. This may seem strange but it allowed him to try for steals when the unwritten rules would have called for retaliation for stealing in that situation. Only an older pro would have the respect to do that. The point is that he had way more opportunities than normal in that season.
Henderson also had the advantage of playing for a team way out of contention, and so, really, there wasn’t any reason to tell him not to keep trying. A’s fans didn’t have a lot else to root for that year so Rickey just kept going. Why not?
The unlikeliness of DiMaggio’s streak is well illustrated by the MLB contest, which has been running for years, where you get to try to beat his streak by picking any hitter you want every day.
No one has ever beaten it - hundreds of thousands of people playing, and so the equivalent of thousands of “years” of hitters trying to break the streak, and it’s a system where people are continually selecting good hitters facing bad pitchers, and they still cannot break the record.
– The 1971 Orioles had four 20-game winners in a season: Jim Palmer, Dave McNally, Mike Cuellar, and Pat Dobson. Given five game rotations now, I can’t see this happening again.
–Back to back home runs by father and son. Griffey Sr and Griffey Jr. You need to have a father and son both in the major leagues, both on the same team, batting consecutively in the order, and both hitting a home run. Odds are long.
That would merely be to tie the record (if “record” it is…). Having a hard time imaging what would constitute breaking it…kind of have to be consecutive home runs by grandfather, son/father, and grandson. Hmm…
Unless they redefine what a ‘win’ is, Cy Young’s 511 wins will stand until the end of time. That’s about as unbreakable a record as I can think of. Some pretty low ERAs and high lifetime batting averages that will probably remain for a long time as well. I think someone, somewhere maybe in the next 50 years could somehow break Joe Dimaggio’s 56 game hit streak. But probably not in my lifetime.
It’s lasted a long time, but it’s a statistical aberration, not an accomplishment. You could get a hit in 1,000 games in a row and have a .250 average.
Records have been watered down a lot, and now statisticians can slap some sort of “superlative” on half the plays in a game, but the 56 game streak is the most overrated of the classic ones.
Kudos to the OP for Tatis, people usually forget that one.
And just for fun, I’ll throw in losing 4 Super Bowls in a row, even though it doesn’t belong.
I’m not sure this is completely true. Granted, nothing in the rules has changed to make stealing many bases impossible - BUT, faster pitching velocity, better athletes behind the plate, and a sabre-metric driven realization that the out hurts worse than the extra base in normal situations make it damn unlikely that stealing a bag will ever be anything other than a situational play. Situational plays with a specific quick runner on first makes it beyond hard to break Ricky’s record.
There really should be a dividing line somewhere in the past the separates modern mlb records from earlier versions of the game. Tim Keefe set that ERA mark back when the pitching distance was 50 feet, batters called for high or low pitches, and foul balls didn’t count as strikes.
I think it will be a long time before two players making their mlb debuts hit back to back homers, as happened this season with Tyler Austin and Aaron Judge. How often do two players have their first mlb at-bats back to back in the first place?
Stephen Jay Gould, in 1985, wrote a letter to DiMaggio talking about the nature of his streak as a statistical anomaly. The letter is published in Gould’s great collection, Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville.