Cy Young holds many but 749 complete games (almost 5 full seasons) will never be approached.
Whatcha got?
Obviously, the ones that won’t be broken because they literally cannot be surpassed (Tony Dorsett’s 99 yd TD run, all the 99 yd TD passes in the NFL, Cromartie’s 109-yd missed FG return for a TD, etc.)
Out of all the ones that theoretically could be broken but are just too difficult to match, my personal favorites are anything that has to do with Fernando Tatis hitting two grand slams off of Chan Ho Park in the same inning back in '99.
Jim Abbot’s record of pitching with the fewest number of hands.
4 twenty game winners on one MLB team in the same year.
Other then this guy.
Wilt Chamberlain averaging 48.5 minutes per game for an NBA regular season, 1961/2
That’s not the Wilt Chamberlain record I was thinking of…
Actually I don’t know if MLB rules require throwing the ball with the hand. And rules can be changed. So there’s a chance.
Cal Ripken Jr.'s 2632 consecutive games played.
His other “record” would have left him no time to play basketball. And may have given him callouses/other maladies in a very unpleasant place…
Glenn Halls’ record of 502 consecutive starts as a NHL goaltender will never be broken.
Lance Armstrong’s record of consecutive cycling victories achieved via doping.
Roger Federer’s current 35th consecutive Quarterfinal in Grand Slams. With no breaks for injuries, either.
I don’t think anyone is likely to throw three no-hitters in a row, even if poor lighting gave Johnny Van Der Meer an assist in his second no-hitter.
He also averaged 50.4 points per game that year, and nobody is going to beat that. The previous season he averaged 27.2 rebounds per game and I’ll go ahead and say that’s never going to be broken either. Chamberlain also has the second- and third- and fourth-best seasons by scoring average. Nobody else has ever come close to averaging 50 points per game for a season, and only a few even got to 35.
Cy Young’s record for career victories (511) and losses (316) are also untouchable.
The record for most pitching victories in a season is 59* by Charlie (Old Hoss) Radbourn in 1884. That mark is now so incredible that it almost seems like something from a tall tale or an ancient legend passed down orally from storyteller to storyteller through the mists of time.
Johnny Vander Meer’s back-to-back no-hitters seems almost entirely unbreakable now (especially since complete games are considerably less common than they were even 30 years ago).
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That’s not the Wilt Chamberlain record I was thinking of…
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His other “record” would have left him no time to play basketball. And may have given him callouses/other maladies in a very unpleasant place…
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I don’t know about that. It just would’ve meant sacrificing quality to quantity.
Anyway, since we’re talking about Wilt, his 100-point game is untouchable. Nowadays, if someone tried to do that, he’d be accused of being a ball-hog and not a team player.
- In some record books, it’s 60 wins. There’s some dispute about one of the games he won.
** And I see while I was posting, Marley23 also mentioned Vander Meer’s no-hitters.
Don Bradman’s test cricket batting average of 99.94 is unlikely to be ever beaten. (The three next best test batsmen have averages between 60 and 61.)
Older thread.Bahahahaha!
BTW, here’s some video of the NFL record 98-yard punt. Tonight was the first night I had ever seen it. Someone who had seen this clip described it to me about 30 years ago, and it’s pretty much the way he described it: It traveled about 70 or so yards in the air, hit the ground and got a hellacious bounce to about the 10, then rolled on to the 1 (or so I was told–to me it looks like it’s going to roll on into the end zone, but the video goes blank at that point).
Someone might point out that this was actually before the NFL-AFL merger(Jets and Broncos both AFL teams). While factually true, this is still an NFL record.
Of course, the season that Chamberlain avg’d 50.4 and scored 100, Bill Russell won MVP that year.
One NBA record that is rarely mentioned is Jose Calderon breaking Calvin Murphy’s record for FT % in 2009, scoring 151 on 154 attempts, a 98.05% rate.
I don’t remember anyone criticizing Kobe Bryant when he scored 61 points in three quarters or 81 in a game. People were impressed. It’s the team that would come under fire, and this should illustrate why nobody’s going to score 100 in a game: in order to get Wilt to 100, the Warriors passed Chamberlain the ball on almost every play in the second half. By the middle of the fourth quarter the Knicks were committing intentional fouls to stop him from getting the ball and trying to kill the clock, and then the Warriors started fouling to stop the clock and get more possessions so they could pass the ball to Chamberlain some more. That - combined with the fact that Chamberlain was a bad free throw shooter who had an exceptionally good day, the Knicks were missing their starting center, soft rims at a shoddy area, and maybe some weak officiating - was how he got to 100. Today this stuff would be considered horrible sportsmanship. Kobe scoring 81 points without doing all of that stuff might be more impressive.
Kobe’s 81 makes me think that the 100-pt game isn’t completely unreachable even in today’s game.
Marley also didn’t mention that, in addition to the other advantages he had in the game, Wilt played in an NBA that was largely slow, white, mostly played below the rim in an era where you could build a career on a nice set shot (though those days were over by 1965.) Wilt was a man among boys for most of his early career: watching some of his early games is akin to that SNL skit where Michael Jordan was playing for a 1950’s era team - there’s no way he could not dominate (except when he was playing Russell that is. Bill just loved beating Wilt the Stilt.)
I don’t know if this is a record or not, but Wilt Chamberlain never fouled out - not in high school, not in college, and not in the NBA. He was actually quite proud of this record, even though it made him a far more timid player when he got to four.