Baseball · 1941 · New York, USA
56 Straight
Across two months of a single season, Joe DiMaggio gets a hit in 56 consecutive games, a record that has stood for more than eight decades without a serious challenge.
56
Consecutive games with a hit
.408
Batting average during streak
Ken Keltner (2 plays)
Streak-ending fielder
Joe DiMaggio began his hitting streak with a single against the Chicago White Sox on 15 May 1941, an unremarkable start to what became the longest hitting streak in Major League Baseball history. Game by game through the rest of May, June, and into July, DiMaggio extended it, batting .408 with 15 home runs and 55 RBIs across the run, drawing national newspaper coverage and even inspiring a hit song, 'Joltin' Joe DiMaggio'.
The streak reached 56 games before ending on 17 July 1941 against the Cleveland Indians, when third baseman Ken Keltner made two sharp backhanded plays to rob DiMaggio of hits and a walk in his other at-bats kept the streak from continuing. DiMaggio then promptly started a new 16-game hitting streak the very next day.
More than eight decades later, no player has come within twelve games of matching it, and sabermetric analysis has repeatedly described 56 as a statistical outlier so extreme it borders on the mathematically improbable. It remains one of the most cited 'unbreakable' records in American professional sport.
Watch the Moment
