I haven't thought of Vandermeer's feat in a while, but I'd agree that it's virtually impossible to replicate, much less exceed.

The most amazing thing about DiMaggio's streak in my mind is that had it not been for two great plays by Ken Keltner, the streak could have been 83; DiMaggio was shut out that game but then hit in the next 17. (My numbers may be off by one or two, but "you can look it up," to quote Casey.)

Oops, 73. My math skills are weak this morning.

WTF happened to Lance Armstrong's 6 consecutive Tour de France wins?

The authors don't think too much of Cal Ripken's 2632 and Lance Armstrong's 6-peat. Those are serious athletic accomplishments that far exceed DiMaggio in terms of athletic accomplishment. I'm not trying to take away from DiMaggio, but the 56 games has a far higher element of luck and fortune than the grind that Ripken and Armstrong went through. Same thing with Edwin Moses. He went out and beat all-comers for 9 years. That's something.

Perhaps a more valid discussion would be separate the freaky "beat-the-odds" sort of streaks from the serious lifetime athletic accomplishments.

Oh, and I have no doubt that someone will come along and crush DiMaggio's record just like they did to Ruth and Maris. Surely there are more pure scatterball hitters like Ichiro out there and one will come along and put the ball in play for more than 56 games.

Everyone talks about Gretzky's 51-game point scoring streak, but I think the fact that he had 13 consecutive seasons scoring 100 or more points is more impressive. Especially considering the closest anyone else has come is six.

None of these streaks hold a candle to the streak of the "Dipsea Demon", Jack Kirk, who ran the difficult Dipsea Race 68 straight years, with his last one in 2003 AT AGE 96, only ending the following year because he had fallen and broken his hip shortly before the race. And for many of those years, Kirk was competitive in the race, winning it two times.

The Unitas streak is much more impressive than DiMaggio's. The reason nobody knows about it is that nobody has even remotely come close to it. Considering the era he played in with much less passing, it is truly an amazing accomplishment.

The Armstrong accomplishment is good, but Indurain won five in a row and Armstrong spends his entire year preparing for those three weeks in France. He's not racing on many other tours.

Ripken?? When your "accomplishment" actually hurts your team's performance it isn't something to boast about. Nobody will ever break that streak because nobody will ever be that selfish in the game of baseball again.

Having looked at all of those streaks, to me the most impressive is Moses. His streak involved no margin for error. DiMaggio had days where he went 1 for 4. Unitas' streak could include games where he threw 1 TD and 3 INTs and his team loses by 20. Moses won every race at that distance for over 9 years against the best in the world.

And BTW, Wilt's record is nothing to sneeze at either. Not only does it mean he had the endurance to last for 45 games but the discipline not to foul out.

Indurain was a great rider but he's one of four who won five Tours. With 6, Armstrong stands alone.

I think you have something Patrick. Athletics is about winning, not some statistic that is only peripheral to winning the event. That's why I think Armstrong and Moses have two of the most impressive accomplishments.

I also noticed that this article only discusses individual streaks, not team accomplishments. How about UCLA winning 10 NCAA basketball championships in 12 years including 7 in a row from 1967-1973? It's going to be a LONG LONG LONG time until any team ever matches that accomplishment in any major college sport much less basketball.

I'm not familiar enough with baseball statistics to be sure, but the first calculation seems wrong. As I understand it, batting average doesn't count walks, nor do walks count for DiMaggio's streak - it has to be a hit in each of 56 consecutive games. So unless average at-bats/game also doesn't count walks, the first calculation overestimates Ichiro's odds, since the chance of not getting a hit during a single at-bat is greater than 1-.372.

The second calculation is closer, but even it omits the fact that the odds of each possible 56-game streak in 161 consecutive games are not independent. If you miss in the 56th game, the odds drop to zero not only for games 1-56, but also for games 2-57, 3-58, and so on up to games 56-111. Thus the odds are even less than 0.3%.

I'll get back to you when I have the correct calculation.

Mathwiz - That calculation most definitely excluded walks. "At-bats" strictly refers to times at bat that end in hits, outs (excluding sacrifices and sac flies) or errors - walks and hit-by-pitches are excluded. The term that encompasses everything is "plate appearances". So that part of the calculation is correct.

Thanks for the clarification, Kuff. Of course, that still leaves this problem in both calculations:

However, this doesn’t take into account the fact that with every hitless game, Ichiro drastically reduces the number of chances he has for a 56-game streak, so his odds are significantly lower.

I tried to come up with a formula for the exact odds, but the problem turned out to be too hard for me. (It turns out to be similar to a binomial function, but with modified, tough-to-compute coefficients.)

I thought about writing a computer program to do a Monte Carlo simulation, but decided instead to just guesstimate, based on this idea: the number of attempts he has at the record isn't 105 (161-56) but about 14 (once at the beginning of the season, plus the number of times he'd be expected to blow the previous attempt with at least 56 games remaining in his season, so he can start another attempt. That's still not exact, but it should be closer). Using that idea with the numbers in the first calculation gives odds of a bit over 0.5%, or 1 in 186, rather than the 4% they came up with.

Which means your overall conclusion is still correct: the odds aren't very good, but they're not impossible either. As long as there's at least one player about as good as Ichiro in major league baseball every season, the odds of seeing DiMaggio's record tied or broken during our remaining lifetimes aren't as remote as the late Stephen J. Gould believed.

I do not know if this counts for anything but on Sept 22 2005 I played in my 500th consecutive game in a 40& older hockey league. (1988 to present date) I am 70 and am still going strong. I cannot find a individual sports streak that has gone on for 17 years. Bruno Colapietro, Endicott NY