Other Crap

Ichiro makes it 26 straight games.

I wrote back in 2003 that Ichiro was the most likely modern player to challenge DiMaggio's streak. Two reasons:

• Hits per plate appearance. Like DiMaggio, Ichiro does not collect a vast number of walks. Hit streaks are almost impossible for many of the best hitters in history because they walk a lot, and in terms of a hit streak, a walk is the same as an out - it is a plate appearance without a hit. Ichiro and DiMaggio, with 50-60 walks a year, are likely hit streak guys, while Ted Williams and Barry Bonds are not, given their monstrous walk counts. The year that Barry Bonds batted .370, he only got a hit in 25% of his plate appearances. In comparison, Ichiro in 2004, with about the same batting average, got a hit in 35% of his plate appearances, and that's actually far better than DiMaggio's 31% the year he had his streak.
  
• Plate appearances per game. Most modern players have a hard time competing with DiMaggio because they can't match the number of times the Clipper came to the plate in each game during the high-scoring period between the wars. Ichiro, however is an exception because he bats lead-off, which typically gives him more appearances per game (4.73 in 2004) than DiMaggio got in 1941 (4.44).
  
• Games played. Ichiro rarely misses a game, thus giving him the maximum number of opportunities in a year. Obviously, one cannot achieve a 56 game hitting streak in a 55 game season. The more games, the more chances. Ichiro played in 161 games in 2004, giving him 106 opportunities for a 56 game streak. (Games 1-56, 2-57, etc) In comparison, Dimaggio played in only 139 games in the streak year, thus giving him only 84 possiblities.
  

If you're good at math, you'll see instantly that Ichiro was actually far more likely to achieve a 56 game streak in 2004 than DiMaggio was during the year he actually did it.

• Ichiro got more plate appearances per game: 4.73 to 4.44
  
• He got more hits per plate appearance: 35% to 31%
  
• He got more opportunities: 106 to 84.
  

In fact, Ichiro was far, far more likely to hit in 56 straight! Of course that doesn't mean much because (2) it's still highly unlikely; and (2) the fact remains that DiMaggio actually did it, despite that fact that the odds were stacked heavily against him.

And stacked they were. If the Clipper came back to life on the field of dreams and replayed the 1941 season an infinite number of times with the exact same number of at bats and hits and games played each time, he would achieve a 56-game hit streak only once every 7500 years! DiMaggio's streak is the nearest thing we have seen to a real miracle. As I'm sure you know, nobody has ever come close to it. The second longest streak is Rose's 44.

Look at it this way: in the history of modern baseball, there have been exactly twelve 45-game hit streaks, and Dimaggio has all twelve of them!! (Games 1-45 of his big streak, games 2-46, games 3-47, and so forth.) There have been exactly eleven 46-game streaks, and Dimaggio has all eleven ... and so forth.

The truly incredible thing is that Dimaggio came within a hair's breadth of a 73-game streak. After he was robbed twice in game 57 by the deft fielding of Kenny Keltner, Joe D proceeded immediately to another 16-game streak. On the field of dreams, a 73 game streak would occur only about once in every million replays of DiMaggio's 1941 season! Imagine that. He nearly pulled off a once-in-a-million shot. Of course he DID pull off a once-in-7500 shot, which is pretty durned amazing in itself.

By the way, the season most likely to produce a 56 game hit streak was George Sisler's 1922, when he had 246 hits in 142 games. The odds against Sisler hitting in 56 straight were "only" about 75-1 that year. (The odds against DiMaggio were about 7500-1 when he actually did it, as indicated earlier.) Sisler actually did hit in 41 straight that year.

Trivia: Ken Landreaux had a 31 game hit streak in a year when he batted .281 with only 4.05 plate appearances per game! Think that's unlikely? Even at that, Landreaux's streak of 31 was four times more likely than DiMaggio's streak of 56 because it's just damned hard to reach 56, no matter how good you are. You need a lot of plate appearances per game, and you can't draw a vast number of walks, and even if you meet both of those qualifications, it's still next to impossible.