Baseball · 1941 · New York, USA
56 Straight
Across two months of a single season, Joe DiMaggio hits safely in 56 consecutive games, and more than eight decades later nobody has come close.
56
Consecutive games with a hit
.408
Batting average during streak
Ken Keltner (2 plays)
Streak-ending fielder
It started with a single against the Chicago White Sox on 15 May 1941, which nobody had any reason to note at the time, and became the longest hitting streak in Major League Baseball history. Through the rest of May, all of June and into July, Joe DiMaggio kept it going, batting .408 with 15 home runs and 55 RBIs across the run, until the newspapers were carrying it nationally and somebody had written a hit song about him, 'Joltin' Joe DiMaggio'.
The streak reached 56 games and ended on 17 July 1941 against the Cleveland Indians, where the third baseman Ken Keltner robbed him twice with sharp backhanded plays and a walk accounted for another trip to the plate. DiMaggio started a fresh 16-game hitting streak the following day.
More than eight decades later, no player has come within twelve games of it. Sabermetric analysis keeps returning the same verdict on 56: a number sitting so far outside the distribution that it borders on the mathematically improbable.
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