Most Unbreakable MLB Streak/Record of All Time?

Opinionated guy wrote:

bullpenninghurts wrote:

Walter Johnson 110 complete game shutouts will never be approached.

Great catch. In an era of a starting pitcher going 5 innings considered an iron man, 110 complete games may not be approached......then throw in shutouts! That might be #1 ahead of Cy Young's 511. For perspective, a pitcher can win 20 games per year for 25 years and still come up 11 wins short of Young.

I'd actually say that this is one of the few mentioned that actually may be broken in our lifetime, simply because no-hitters are not that unbelievably rare and it only takes 2 starts (5-6 days) to happen. Many of those records take an entire season or more. While it's highly unlikely that this would happen, it's certainly more probable than someone playing 2000+ consecutive games or hitting 74 HRs.

I know one thing that makes baseball "baseball" is the deep history of the sport, but there really needs to be re-evaluation of records and the creation of "modern records."

Sure, the game is the same in that you hit a ball thrown by a pitcher, then run around bases. However, as others have pointed out, too much has changed with the game that was around in the 19th and early 20th centuries and baseball after WW2.

In fact, maybe records after the pitching mound change in the late 60s would be the cut off. It drastically cut the advantage pitchers had over batters, and the stats from the 70s on are not necessarily out of line with today when accounting for small parks and juiced balls.

Ding ding ding ding! This guy gets it. Records #1, #3, #4, and #9 as the game has been constituted over the past 75+ years are IMPOSSIBLE to be broken. All the others on the list could be broken with Bonds' HR record being most vulnerable.

browski wrote:

Opinionated guy wrote:

Great catch. In an era of a starting pitcher going 5 innings considered an iron man, 110 complete games may not be approached......then throw in shutouts! That might be #1 ahead of Cy Young's 511. For perspective, a pitcher can win 20 games per year for 25 years and still come up 11 wins short of Young.

I'd actually say that this is one of the few mentioned that actually may be broken in our lifetime, simply because no-hitters are not that unbelievably rare and it only takes 2 starts (5-6 days) to happen. Many of those records take an entire season or more. While it's highly unlikely that this would happen, it's certainly more probable than someone playing 2000+ consecutive games or hitting 74 HRs.

It would take 3 consecutive complete game no-hitters to break this record. Two only ties it and the title asks for unBREAKABLE. I really did not know about Johnson's record of 110 complete game shutouts but this seems like a top 3 for sure if not #1.

The career pitching records are never going to be broken due to the modern game pitching every 5 days vs 4 and teams tracking pitch counts.

1 & 2 should be Cy Young's career wins and Nolan Ryan's strikeouts. For comparison, lets take a modern-day starter who has been very dominant, had great longevity, and gets a lot of strikeouts. Justin Verlander is 36 and got a fairly early start to the majors for a starter at 22. In 14 years he less then half the wins of Cy Young and is almost 2500 strikeouts short of Ryan. He would have to pitch 10 more years to catch Ryan at his current pace and about 16 to catch Young. Kershaw who is by far the best pitcher of the era is on about the same pace. Simply put given modern-day baseball those records are unbreakable. The single-season stuff can always be broken by a strong streak but the pitching career records are out.

As far as hitting career records Ty Cobb's career average is out given modern-day competition. He did that in a different era. Very few hitters manage one season above his career average. No one has shown the ability to do it for several seasons in a row in many years.

I thought that both Rod Carew and Tony Gwynn would have single season batting averages higher than Ty Cobb's career average (.367) and only had one - .388. He did have 3 that were close - .364, ..359 and .360. Gwynn had 4 years above Cobb's average including his .394. He had number of other years which were exceptional.

browski wrote:

Opinionated guy wrote:

Great catch. In an era of a starting pitcher going 5 innings considered an iron man, 110 complete games may not be approached......then throw in shutouts! That might be #1 ahead of Cy Young's 511. For perspective, a pitcher can win 20 games per year for 25 years and still come up 11 wins short of Young.

I'd actually say that this is one of the few mentioned that actually may be broken in our lifetime, simply because no-hitters are not that unbelievably rare and it only takes 2 starts (5-6 days) to happen. Many of those records take an entire season or more. While it's highly unlikely that this would happen, it's certainly more probable than someone playing 2000+ consecutive games or hitting 74 HRs.

Your scenario for consecutive no-hitters only addresses tying the existing record. To break the record it would take 3 starts and odds go up exponentially after the second one.

The record is 32 years and counting.

Oh...my bad. I thought this was a thread about Jamin not getting a date. Sorry.

Gwynn has been retired for over 15 years. Carew over 30. Gwynn is the best hit for average player of the last 70ish years and he is over 30 pts behind Cobb. Seriously, look at the all time hit list, color photo's don't exist for anyone ahead of Gwynn. Cobb isn't that far ahead of the next group from his era but in the modern era it will be impossible for anyone to get close unless there is some sort of rule or technology change. Gwynn was a little better than contemporary Boggs. If you look at current players the best is Miggy at .315. over .05 behind Cobb. The only one even close to Miggy is Altuve who hasn't played long enough to have started on the decline of his career. The career batting average record is dead.

Another unbreakable record, that should be #1, is for most grand slam home runs in one inning.

The record is 2 by Fernando Tatis.

No way is anybody ever going to get to bat 3 times in the same inning with the bases loaded.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syFmUVFNRZE

yeah-those pitching records will be untouchable for the reasons of both pitch counts and the "dead ball era" as opposed to the steroid era and "juiced ball era".

23. Terry Forster

His .397 batting average is tops for any major leaguer with either 50 at bats or 15 years of major league experience.

Rube Marquard in 1912 won 19 games in a row. He pitched in a different era. I don't exactly recall but he would put like tobacco spit on the ball to darken it. (Again I don't recall exactly). It was in the deadball era. You would think that 19 victories in a row would never be matched again with today's hitters and especially this year with the record homers. But Gerritt Cole did manage to go 19-0 in his last 19 decisions. So, you can never say never but 511 wins is almost never going to happen.

I think you have to look at the big picture. Most of the time when we talk about this and that record "will never be broken", we really mean in the next 20 or 30 years. Beyond that, it's hard to tell how the game will evolve. If MLB is still around in 1000 years, who knows what it will be like? Maybe ballparks will be huge, with fences 600 ft from home plate. Then the triples record could easily come into play.

Or, nobody really foresaw the whole steroid explosion that led to the Bonds home run record. A similar totally unexpected event or trend ("out of left field" as they say in baseball) could lead to other "unbreakable" records being broken.

I like the Stephen Jay Gould book where he talks about baseball records, and most specifically why we don't have .400 hitters any more. Basically, it's because everybody's too good nowadays. There are no bad players in MLB (except maybe current Chris Davis). So it's harder to be a totally dominant player (that's not a very good summary of what Gould said, but whatever...) But you can kind of take his reasoning and work backwards with it. What if baseball as a national pastime slowly starts to fade away? Salaries go down, attendance goes down, quality of play goes down...evolution in reverse. There would be lots of middling-to-bad athletes in the league in comparison to, say, the 1980's. But then the league would be ripe for domination by one really good, talented player who could totally dominate those untalented pitchers/hitters.

Unlikely, sure, but it's interesting to ponder.

Bob Gibson had an ERA of 1.12 in 1968 but wasn't the mound much higher back then?

"Too many pitchers, that's all, there are just too many pitchers. Ten or twelve on a team. Don't see how any of them get enough work." - Cy Young

Two Complete Game Victories by One Pitcher on the Same Day

https://www.baseball-almanac.com/feats/feats24.shtml

The thing that drives me crazy (and I'm not accusing you, and haven't really seen it thus far in this thread) is when people talk about those old records as if guys were incredibly tough back then, and are a bunch of pampered babies nowadays. Like with the lack of complete games nowadays. Sometimes people make it out like it's just because guys today are too wimpy to pitch more than 5 or 6 innings. And it's so not the case. Take any group of pro athletes, and they generally want to play as much as possible.

I mean, Clayton Kershaw would probably have hundreds of complete games if he was pitching against high school teams. That's probably what it was like for Walter Johnson.

Of all the "untouchable" records, the one I find perhaps most interesting is DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak. It will be hard to surpass under just about any foreseeable alterations to the game (as long as the relative advantage of pitchers vs hitters is somewhat consistent). DiMaggio hit, like, .367 or something that season I believe. If you just run a bunch of random trials of a .367 hitter getting 4 at-bats a game, the odds against them hitting in 56 in a row have to be astounding. It's just so easy to go 0 for 2 with 2 walks, or hit the ball hard but still make an out, or various other possibilities in which a player can still be on top of their game but not get a hit.

"Tougher" is subjective but when you look at the number of innings pitchers used to throw decades ago and compare that with what they throw today you certainly could toss out a word like "pampered." Given the salaries, pampering makes a lot of sense and maybe some of those pitchers would like to pitch a lot deeper into games than they're allowed.

But for "tougher," I'm going to go back to the guy with the record that I would bet most heavily on being unbreakable; Hoss Radbourne's 59 wins in one season. He pitched maybe 3 days out of 4, sometimes more than that. Late in the season he had to have his manager help him get dressed because his right arm was almost immobile and sore. Yet each game day he'd get to the park and warm up by throwing underhand until he could throw normally then pitch in the game.

Most RBI’s in a season by Hack Wilson. 191 in 1930. The most anyone has hit in the past 81 years is 165 by Manny Ramirez in 1999.