HIT STREAK

JOE DIMAGGIO: "Baseball didn't really get into my blood until I knocked off that hitting streak. Getting a daily hit became more important to me than eating, dringking or sleeping."

Records are a way we keep track of the extraordinary events in history. We use them to measure our greatness. And many records are on the basis of streaks: Ruth's consecutive over forty home run seasons, Cobb's twenty three straight seasons with over .300 batting average,  Ted Williams reaching base in eighty four games in a row, Cal Ripken Jr.'s 2,632 consecutive game streak, and the 1916 New York Giants twenty six game win streak are but only a few examples. But it turns out, when time is taken into account, most records, even beyond baseball, fall into the statistically reasonable category. That is to say, when the relative skill of athletes and the relative time of play is taken into account these records are within the bounds of the mathematical probability distribution (i.e. a team who wins 70% of their games will statistically win twenty six games in a row once in every eleven thousand games. And given a team like the Cubs has played over twenty thousand games we are within the reasonable amount of time-played for an event like that to occur without it being considered exceptional). It's not to say that these achievements aren't great, but it is saying that at the current level and time of play these achievements were bound to happen. In this sense, statistics can help to curb our sense of specialness. Our evolutionary superiority creates a tendency to look at the trends of our achievements myopically, within the bubble of but a few hundred or thousand years. But this excludes the fact that we humans have existed for but a blip in the billions of years of our world. True greatness includes the feats of certain strains of bacteria which have persisted for over three billion years on this planet or, at a larger scale, animals like jellyfish, who have been in our seas for over 500 million years. So are there really any sports achievements that are statistically improbable and therefore truly exceeds what seems humanly possible when the mathematics are taken into account? Turns out, yes, Joe DiMaggio's fifty six game hit streak. 

If you enjoyed this new meditation on the deeper meaning of the game, you’ll love THE ART OF WAR AND BASEBALL!! Check it out here: www.theartofwarandbaseball.com