There has been some talk about Jorge Cantu running his hitting streak to 20 games. However, his Marlins team has only played 16 games this season. We have seen this before where hitting streaks extend over two seasons. The debate this brings up is whether or not a hitting streak should count when its spans over two seasons.
At first glance, I think it is a clear yes. Despite the gastric reflex it seems to cause when I think of it, theoretically, it is valid. Why should a guy be penalized if there was several months between games? I mean the Cal Ripken Jr streak is over several seasons and everyone loves him for that (sort of).
But I think it is a dull point to the much more fascinating point: that we are talking about this streak at all when a player is only 35% of the way there. Doesn't that say something about the streak itself?
While DiMaggio was pursuing this feat, he had to deal with some extraordinary circumstances. He had this favorite bat stolen mid-streak. His team mates didn't know how to interact with him. The media was in a frenzy. All of that adds to the aura of the record. What if a team pitched around him for a night? Streak over. What is his teammates were cold and he only got to the plate three times? On the night the streak died, he hit two screamers that were caught for outs. Baseball is funny that way. So many things in baseball just seem to predicated on luck.
But here is why I bring this up. A Nobel laureate physicist named Ed Purcell applied gaming theory and coin-flip theory to analyze all baseball streak and slump records. What he found was very interesting. Every single record in baseball history except one falls within the boundaries of what would statistically expect to happen. In other words, nothing ever happened above and beyond the frequency predicted by coin-toss models. So win streaks, losing streaks, hot and cold streaks, etc.- they all are scientifically expected. There is only one exception and only one as this excerpt from the book Joe DiMaggio and the Summer of 41 by Michael Siedel so eloquently states,
There is one major exception, and absolutely only one—one sequence so many standard deviations above the expected distribution that it should not have occurred at all. Joe DiMaggio’s fifty-six–game hitting streak in 1941. The intuition of baseball aficionados has been vindicated. Purcell calculated that to make it likely (probability greater than 50 percent) that a run of even fifty games will occur once in the history of baseball up to now (and fifty-six is a lot more than fifty in this kind of league), baseball’s rosters would have to include either four lifetime .400 batters or fifty-two lifetime .350 batters over careers of one thousand games. In actuality, only three men have lifetime batting averages in excess of .350, and no one is anywhere near .400 (Ty Cobb at .367, Rogers Hornsby at .358, and Shoeless Joe Jackson at .356). DiMaggio’s streak is the most extraordinary thing that ever happened in American sports. He sits on the shoulders of two bearers—mythology and science. For Joe DiMaggio accomplished what no other ballplayer has done. He beat the hardest taskmaster of all, a woman who makes Nolan Ryan’s fastball look like a cantaloupe in slow motion—Lady Luck.That is just incredible. Will we ever see what Joe DiMaggio did that summer recreated in any sport? Science says no.
That is truly amazing.
Posts
