Two mathematicians have calculated the odds behind Joe DiMaggio’s still-unbeaten after 66 years 56 game hitting streak:
WITH the baseball season under way and the memory of scandal in the sport so fresh, many fans yearn for an earlier era, a time when mythology mingled with baseball. The sport’s most mythic achievement is Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak, a feat that has never come even close to being matched. Fans and scientists alike, including Edward M. Purcell, a Nobel laureate in physics, and Stephen Jay Gould, the evolutionary biologist, have described the streak as well-nigh impossible.
In a fit of scientific skepticism, we decided to calculate how unlikely Joltin’ Joe’s achievement really was. Using a comprehensive collection of baseball statistics from 1871 to 2005, we simulated the entire history of baseball 10,000 times in a computer. In essence, we programmed the computer to construct an enormous set of parallel baseball universes, all with the same players but subject to the vagaries of chance in each one.
And the result ? Mathematically speaking, they claim, DiMaggio’s feat wasn’t statistically impossible at all:
More than half the time, or in 5,295 baseball universes, the record for the longest hitting streak exceeded 53 games. Two-thirds of the time, the best streak was between 50 and 64 games.
In other words, streaks of 56 games or longer are not at all an unusual occurrence. Forty-two percent of the simulated baseball histories have a streak of DiMaggio’s length or longer. You shouldn’t be too surprised that someone, at some time in the history of the game, accomplished what DiMaggio did.
The real surprise is when the record was set. Our analysis reveals that 1941 was one of the least likely seasons for such an epic streak to occur.
Of course, baseball isn’t played in a computer generated alternative universe. It’s played on the baseball diamond, and, on that field, only two men, Pete Rose (44 hits in 1978) and Paul Molitor (39 hits in 1987) have even come close to DiMaggio’s record. Each of the most recent hitting streaks — Moises Allou in 2007, Willie Taveras in 2006, Albert Puljos in 2003, Luis Gonzales in 1999, Eric Davis in 1998, and Sandy Alomar Jr. and Nomar Garciaparra in 1997 — all ended at 30 consecutive hits.
The computer doesn’t play baseball and, for the last 66 seasons, nobody has done what Joe DiMaggio did back in 1941.
That’s got to count for something.
