Johnny VanDeMeers back to back no-hitters.
What about Brett Favre’s consecutive games started for a QB? He’s at 140-some now and shows no sign of losing durability (of course, that can change in a split second). Considering the beatings that QBs take these days (hello Mark Brunell), getting half that many is quite the accomplishment.
How about the Lakers 33 game winning streak, or UCLA’s 88 game winning streak.
Growing up in SoCal in the late 60’s to early 70’s, Baylor, West, Chamberlain, Goodrich, Alcindor, Wicks, Rowe, Walton, Wilkes, Wooden. Man, it was a great time to be an L.A. area basketball fan.
Hornsby’s .424 is just bizarre to even contemplate for the modern game. Cy Young’s record is based on longevity, which is a very remote possibility.
But the strangest has got to be DiMaggio’s 56 games. On the one hand it seems simple, just hit onto base safely for those games. Yet has anyone ever computed the odds of this? Even assuming a .400 average (which Joe almost had that year), mulitply 1 and its result by .400 57 times. Can somebody correct my rusty math, but aren’t the odds something like 2.07692E-23? That’s assuming that pitchers don’t choose to pitch or not pitch to the batter. Un blanking believeable.
Just to toss out another DiMaggio stat from that season - In 1941, DiMaggio struck out only 13 times!
My math is weak, but I think you are missing one vital part of the equation. DiMaggio would get up at least 3, sometimes 4 or 5 times a game. That would make the odds slightly higher. I believe your math computes the possibility of him hitting in 56 consecutive at-bats! Much tougher.
Still, hitting in 56 consecutive games IS incredible…
And I wouldn’t call it unbreakable, but what are the odds of someone topping Fernando Tatis’s 2 grandslams in the same inning?
Yep, you are quite right. I’d forgot about multiple at bats. So what is the math for that (I am too far out from second year algebra to do this.) I think that means the odds he will not get a hit during a game are .1296 assuming four at bats a game and a .400 average, and .8704 chance of continuing the streak per game. That gives us the much more reasonable -0.000366418 chance of someone hitting safely in 57 games. I don’t think that is right either, as that makes it too easy. Someone who is both a baseball nut and statistics expert should tackle this one for us.
Your math is right, and I don’t see why this makes it so easy.
That’s three hundredths of a percent of a chance for a .400 hitter to hit safely in any 57 straight games - in other words, it would happen three times in every 10,000 .400 seasons. Well, there haven’t been ten thousand .400 seasons. There haven’t been that many .300 seasons. (Actually, it should happen more than that, since there’s more than one 57-game stretch in a 162-game seasons, but you get the idea - it’s really remote.)
Furthermore, averaging four at-bats per game is EXTREMELY unlikely for a .400 hitter. Most .400 hitters have averaged 3.2-3.9 at bats per game, a significant difference. Joe DiMaggio didn’t average four at bats per game when he had his 56-game hitting streak, either.
Oscar Robertson averaged a triple-double over the course of a season. Damn.
Due to a medical redshirt, Nate James of Duke played for five ACC championship teams from 1997-2001. The only way someone can beat this record is if they play for six seasons (getting two in-season medical redshirts; can you do that?) on a team good enough to win the conference championship every year. Not gonna happen anytime soon.
RickJay:
If that math is right, any single four hundred hitter has a 3 in 10,000 chance in any given season of hitting 57. However, any .400 hitter has this chance, and .300 hitters and .200 hitters have their chance too. Assuming an average of 600 MLB players during any given year, once every dozen years or so someone would do it. That’s why I thought the math was wrong.
The math is correct. Remember, 3 out every 10,000 .400 hitters would be expected to hit safely in 57 straight games. The odds lower tremendously as your average goes down. A quick Excel spreadsheet gives the following (Yeah, I’m a geek):
.400 - 3.7 out of 10,000
.375 - 2 out of 25,000
.350 - 1.4 out of 100,000
.325 - 1.7 out of 1,000,000
.300 - 0.8 out of 5,000,000
.250 - 1 out of 2.6 billion
.200 - 1 out of 11 trillion
Seems pretty safe, but then again that’s what they said about Gehrig’s streak.
College football:
Nebraska’s 60-3 record in a 5-year span in the 90s
Oklahoma’s 47-game winning streak in the 50s
Ohio State’s Archie Griffith’s 2 Heisman trophies (no junior winner is going to stay his senior year)
Kansas’ Gale Sayer’s 99-yard TD run (perhaps tied, never broken)
Or especially not if the season (or playoffs for that matter) were to be increased, they would be more likely to get injured!
Here’s another next to impossible feat–Mario Lemiuex scoring 5 goals 5 different ways–shorthanded, power play, even strength, penalty shot, empty net–in one game against the Devils on Dec 31, 1988. Penalty shots almost never happen and even if you got the others the game still has to be close enough for the other team to pull its goalie. The Penguins won that game 8-6.
I’ll agree that the season records (92 goals and 215 points) are nearly untouchable (Jaromir Jagr won the Art Ross Trophy last year with 121 points) simply because the style of play now is much tighter than it was in the early 80’s.
http://msn.espn.go.com/nhl/preview2001/s/2001/0924/1254902.html
Gretzky’s career assists (1963) and points (2857) are fairly safe from any of the any of those trailing him. However, if Mario Lemieux stays healthy for a few seasons, he could make a very real run for Gretzky’s career goals record. Gretzky has 894 goals in 1487 games and 20 seasons for a .601 goals per game average. Lemieux currently stands at 648 goals in only 788 games and 13 seasons, for an average of .822. Even with only 60 games played a year, that averages to 50 goals a year (which Lemieux is easily capable of, as he scored 35 last year in 43 games), it will take 5 years to pass Wayne…in 5 years Mario will barely have turned 40.
Dimaggio’s record is far from safe. Ichiro has a decent chance of breaking it:
http://www.baseballprospectus.com/news/20010518jazayerli.html
(Since this article, his batting average has dropped about 15 points, which changes the odds only slightly.)
Oh yeah, the author screwed up the math slightly in the original. The correction is here. But the point remains that Ichiro has everything going for him to break Dimaggio’s record.
All of these records are unbreakable - until they’re finally broken. C’mon, look at the untouchable 60 homers in season. Now, in five years, how many times has that been shattered? And here Bonds, instead of being respected by the whole baseball world, like McGwire was, is instead covered in shadow and doubt: Oh, the balls are juiced and the parks are small and the bats are wooden and the grass isn’t cut short enough. Personally, I think Babe Ruth is the greatest homer hitter of all time (and if he never pitched but stuck to batting from the start of his career, he’d have 1000 homeruns), but Bonds deserves all the respect for breaking this record (assuming he does so in the next few days).
56 game hitting streak - why can’t it be smashed? And that Cal Ripken streak is a sham anyway so I wouldn’t bother giving it a moment’s notice. I mean, if he broke it without thinking about it, going out in pain to help his team instead of putting himself into immortality, then he deserves respect. But when he’s going out, essentially, just to touch the record, BIG DEAL. No accomplishment. And it’s baseball. He’s just standing there! We’re not talking about basketball or soccer, where you’re expected to haul your butt and do work every second of the game.
Baseball may not be as strenuous as some other sports, but maintaining a 162-game schedule (while playing the infield!) is quite a feat in itself. Don’t underestimate Ripken’s streak, or just compare it to everyone else out there.