Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak came to an end on this day in 1941. The streak is considered by many to be unbreakable, with Pete Rose mounting the most serious offensive in 1979 with a 44-game streak.
The anniversary of DiMaggio’s streak and the notion of an unbreakable record did inspire us to think about which records in the great big book of baseball history might be impervious to assault from future generations of ballplayers. Is it Bonds’ home-run record? Maybe, but A-Rod is still swinging and he’s not retiring till the Yankees roll him the last dime that he’s owed in three years.
I want to say Rickey Henderson’s runs scored record won’t fall, but Mike Trout is Superman and you never know. Mike Trout, like Clayton Kershaw, is the reason why this list is half as long as it could be — young stars who could dent the record book by the time they’re done playing or who could simply fade away after a few good years like so many other once-thought legends. Or they could be like Derek Jeter, a player who once seemed like he might replace Pete Rose as the hit king, only to show occasional flashes of humanness and a lack of desire to chase that record into his mid-40s.
Here’s a look at a few records that won’t be topped.
Most Home Runs By A Pitcher
A depressed offensive climate and an era of widened interleague play, it’s entirely feasible that Major League Baseball might give traditionalists a poke in the eye and bring the designated hitter to the national league, preserving careers, creating runs, and damning the art of the double-switch to the refuse pile of history. So with that in mind, Wes Ferrell’s record of 38 home runs as a pitcher is incredibly safe.
Most Stolen Bases
I like Billy Hamilton as much as the next guy, but while he’s a great runner, he’s no Rickey Henderson. Besides being one of baseball’s all-time great characters, Rickey was also a complete ballplayer and an all-time great. How’s Billy Hamilton going to steal 1,406 bases to tie Rickey when his on-base-percentage struggles to stay over .300? It’s at .269 this season. Rickey finished up with an .401 OBP over the course of his 25-year career.
Beyond skill, there is that longevity. Rickey played for more seasons than Billy Hamilton has lived years at this point. I don’t honestly know how or why Rickey Henderson isn’t sitting on a bench somewhere in the majors, playing cards waiting to go in as a pinch runner. The man led the league with 66 stolen bases at age 39. He swiped 56 bases combined in the seasons he was 41 and 42 and took his last bag at 44. Billy Hamilton and Dee Gordon are exciting — especially since baseball’s risk-averse-analytics crowd doesn’t seem to eager to let potential runs risk getting nailed while trying to swipe a base — but Rickey was Rickey, baby.
The Single-Season RBI Record
Though seeing sluggers with 130 RBIs seemed commonplace recently, last year Mike Trout led the American League with 111, 80 shy of Hack Wilson’s record of 191 RBIs. I don’t want to cry “offensive depression” again here because the fact remains that the war between bat and ball swings all over the place, but even in the height of the ’90s steroid era, the closest anyone got to the record was Manny Ramirez with 165 in 1999, and that was the most since 1938.
Most Wins By A Pitcher
There have been debates over the last few years over if the 300-game winner is in danger of becoming extinct, so it seems pretty clear that nobody is winning 511 games. Nolan Ryan pitched for 27 seasons thanks to Advil and the years he extracted from Robin Ventura by besting him in battle, and he only won 324 games. Besides Walter Johnson, no one else has even reached the 400-win mark. Clayton Kershaw, the best pitcher in the game, threw his first pitch at 20 and has compiled 104 wins at 27, averaging 16 wins a season. If Kershaw threw as long as Ryan did (up to age 47) and won 16 games a year for the next 20 years, he’d barely beat out Johnson for second place.
Most Complete Games
In the time it took you to read this far, four Major League pitchers felt their elbow ligaments snap. This is, of course, a slight exaggeration, but the point is that teams are increasingly precious about the arms within their organization now that all the arms in baseball seem to be so tenuous. What that means is pitch counts and rigorous monitoring, so someone coming along to break Cy Young’s record of 749 complete games (out of an equally unfathomable 815 starts) is an impossibility unless baseball shrinks down to six-inning games, and even then, the odds would be long.
Bob Feller’s record of 36 complete games in a season is a lock to remain untouched as well. It’s been 29 years since the last time someone threw 20 complete games (Fernando Valenzuela), only two pitchers have thrown as many as 15 in a season since then, and only James Shields, who threw 11 in 2011, has reached double digits in the last 16 seasons.
Career Saves
You can debate the merits of the save stat in a time where two-inning saves are a rarity and the 9th inning is often not the biggest obstacle standing in the way of a win, but you can’t deny Mariano Rivera’s enviable run of dominance. From 1997-2013, Mo averaged 38 saves a game on the way to saving 652 games over the course of his 19-year career to top Trevor Hoffman (601 saves) for the record. Is it impossible that someone will come along and be that consistently dominant and clutch?
Maybe Craig Kimbrel, who is almost 1/3 of the way up the mountain top with 209 saves at the age of 27, will have the good fortune to avoid having a bad month or an arm injury, as Rivera did. But it just seems unfathomable in what is one of baseball’s most insecure jobs. Look at Fernando Rodriguez, who was once what Kimbrel was. No seriously, by 27, K-Rod had led the league in saves three times (Kimbrel’s done it four times) and sat at 243 saves, with 241 of those coming in the six seasons between his 22nd and 27th birthday. Over the course of the last six seasons, though, Rodriguez lost his closer role (only regaining it in full last season) and saved only 124 games, almost half his previous output. Doing what Mariano Rivera and Trevor Hoffman did for as long as they did it is hard, is what I’m saying.
Consecutive Games Played
In the history of baseball, only seven players have played in more than 1,000 consecutive games. Cal Ripken, Jr., played in 2,632 straight games. Up until Sunday, Chris Coughlan had been the active leader in consecutive games played, but he sat out the last game of the first half and his streak ended at 151. He was so close!
Last year, four players played in all 162 games.
You can’t just be healthy, you have to justify getting into each game with your play and you have to push your manager to overlook your nagging injuries because they know that even when banged up, you’re still one of his best nine guys.
This streak will not be equaled, and even if the number could be matched, the importance of Ripken’s streak could never be touched. Not to be overgrand, but when Ripken surpassed Lou Gehrig’s once-thought-unbreakable mark of 2,130 consecutive games, he reminded people about baseball’s respect for heirlooms and history at a time when most dismissed the game as one that had been lost to its greedy impulses after the 1994 strike. That’s the value of these records — targets, a measuring stick for greatness, and a tie to the games lush past.
