Ed Walsh of the White Sox set a modern era record of 464 innings pitched in a single major league season (1908). Barely anyone exceeds half that total now.
Big Ed can rest easy; no one will ever come close to matching his record.
Pretty much all of the career and single-season pitching records from the dead-ball era that related to much pitching one did will never be broken: games, complete games, innings pitched, wins, etc. It was a very different game back then. Even if another knuckleball pitcher along the lines of Wilbur Wood got the chance to start 50 games a year, he still would only get close.
Meant ‘games started’ not ‘games’, where the records are the province of modern-era relievers.
From the wikipedia entry about Bradman: "Wisden hailed Bradman as, “the greatest phenomenon in the history of cricket, indeed in the history of all ball games”. Statistician Charles Davis analysed the statistics for several prominent sportsmen by comparing the number of standard deviations that they stand above the mean for their sport. The top performers in his selected sports are:
Athlete Sport Statistic Standard deviations
Bradman Cricket Batting average 4.4
Pelé Association football Goals per game 3.7
Ty Cobb Baseball Batting average 3.6
Jack Nicklaus Golf Major titles 3.5
Michael Jordan Basketball Points per game 3.4 "
And Bradman lost the best years of his career to WWII.
Most have been mentioned, but essentially all pitching records that involve pitching many innings will never be broken. Wins, innings pitched, complete games, all of it.
The record for shutouts in a season is 16, by Grover Cleveland Alexander. Not since 1988 has an entire TEAM had that many complete game shutouts.
Most of the PGA records set in 1945, against competition decimated by the war — Byron Nelson winning 18 times and 11 in a row; Jug McSpaden getting 31 top tens and 13 second place finishes; Babe Zaharias making the cut 3 times out of 3 attempts.
I can’t find the book or list online. Did he mention where DiMaggio’s 56 game streak fell on the number of SD from the mean? I remember a Stephen Jay Gould essay where he picked that feat as one of the most statistically improbable.
Phil Taylor’s very many darts records (e.g. 16 World titles, including 8 in a row)
I’d forgotten about this one and had to look it up to be sure. The 1971 Orioles did it (Palmer, Dobson, McNalley & Cueller). Interestingly, they didn’t win the World Series, losing to the Pirates in 7 games.
Joe Louis’ 25 title defenses.
81 is pretty far short of 100, though. And in fact nobody else other than Chamblerlain (and Kobe, this once) has ever scored more than 73 in a game.
Right. I think there is just way too much athleticism in the league now. The best players stand out, but not to that extent. And even with Chamberlain being a man among boys, it took a lot of factors and some really blatant manipulation to get him to 100.
Kobe’s line score in the 81pt game:
Minutes: 41
FG: 28-46 (60.9%)
3pt: 7-13 (53%)
FT: 18-20 (90%)
Pts: 81
Extrapolate that over a full 48 minute game (remember Chamberlain played all 48 minutes in his 100pt game) and the numbers look like this:
Min: 48
FG: 33-54 (60.9%)
3pt: 8-15 (53%)
FT: 21-23 (90%)
Pts: 95
Convert 2 more 3 pointers and Kobe’s at 101.
Send him to the line 3 more times and Kobe’s at 100 (assuming he goes 5-6).
YMMV, but I think it was doable if he played the full game.
NHL
Unlikely that any goalie will ever beat the record for most consecutive games started (502 by Glen Hall in the late 1950s/early1960s). In the modern 82 game season, it’s just asking too much of a goalie.
Gretzky - 215 points in a season is pretty unlikely to ever be beaten, as is his 51 consecutive games point streak. Probably a few more, but those two certainly come to mind.
I think Martin Brodeur’s shutout record (120 and counting, not including this season) is pretty secure, give as the next closest active goalie is Luongo with 60 of them. Brodeur also has nearly twice the number of regular season wins as the next closest active goalie (656+ to Luongo’s 339), so that one looks ot be secure for a while too. 113 playoff wins (that’s 28+ successful playoff rounds, or 7 Stanley Cup victories) are also going to be hard to beat. Playoff shutouts too.
Frankly, looking through this list, Martin Brodeur is kind of dominating most of the records.
In other words even if you extrapolate his stats, he’s still short. And he wasn’t taken out because the game was out of hand or anything. He sat out the first six minutes of the second quarter while the Lakers were losing - that might be the real story; this was a competitive game until near the end. He scored 26 points in the first half (in 18 minutes) followed by 55 in the second half. It looks to me like he really played 42 minutes: he sat out exactly six minutes in the second quarter, and the last 4 seconds of the game. If he’d played the entire game it seems more likely to me that his performance would have tailed off at the end of the second half.
Not only will it never be broken, it will never even be approached.
Orel Hershiser’s scoreless inning streak will stand forever at 59.
It’s not that long ago that people were saying nobody could break Gehrig’s streak.
Never mind…
Bradman has been mentioned but I suspect no one will ever break Jim Lakers match figures of 19 for 90 versus Australia.
Margaret Courts record of 24 grand slams will never be broken. Graf with 22 came close but otherwise…
To his credit, this is one record Bill James specifically called out as being a record everyone said couldn’t be broken that he felt could be. And I’d agree Ripken’s record is breakable, too.
All it requires is that you START a long streak and then just be lucky. One a guy gets close to a thousand games in a row he’s not coming out unless he needs to. Ripken just never needed to; he never broke his hand, or seriously hurt himself in any way. Someone else could get lucky.
As to this, I would argue that these may be to some extent mutually exclusive. Gretzky’s record was a product, in part, of the NHL being really high scoring. Brodeur’s is a product, in part, of it going through a low-scoring period.
If goals in the average NHL game stay where they are now Gretzky’s record could not possibly be broken. You can’t score 215 points in a league where no team scores 300 goals. The year Gretzky had 215 points the Oilers scored over FOUR HUNDRED goals - that is, there were still over 200 goals scored by the Oilers that Gretzky wasn’t involved with. Last year some teams didn’t sscore as many goals even including their best players as those Oilers teams scored without Gretzky. There’s a limit as to how high a percentage of a team’s goals a player’s point total can get to. (It’s roughly half. I think Lemieux holds the record, in 1989-1990; he was in on 57% of Pittsburgh’s goals.)
But conversely, if goals stay low, Brodeur’s record could be broken. A great goalie who last two decades could pull it off. On the other hand, if changes are made to allow more goal scoring, Brodeur’s record could not be broken, but Gretzky’s could.