Strat-O-Matic Baseball 365

Noticed recently that Rogers Hornsby has an active 40 game hitting streaking one of my leagues as of this posting.

http://onlinegames.strat-o-matic.com/team/1387839

Don't mean to jinx him in any way, it it did get me to thinking that we see all sorts of amazing statistical feats in ATG, but I have never seen anyone realistically approach the magic number of 56.

Guess it goes to show how special that mark is.

who keeps up with the streak?

I think it's fascinating that for all the countless leagues and individual seasons we've had in ATG, nobody has ever matched Joe Dimaggio's real-life streak of 56 games. The highest reported streak we have had so far is a 52 game streak by Heilmann.

By contrast, Vince Coleman has stolen 200 bases, and Barry Bonds' HR record tops out at 114 and descends through five rungs to 105. Barry has 282 RBI, trailed by the Babe at 253. Sam Thompson has 55 triples. Cobb has a .454 BA in one season and 334 hits in another.

This puts the uniqueness of Dimag's streak in perspective. There must have been thousand more individual seasons so far in ATG than in real baseball, but no simulated season has as yet caught up with what Dimaggio did vs. real competition in 1941.

I had Billy Hamilton hit in 77 straight.
It was in a chicks dig the long ball season.
No pitchers over $1.00

danielz wrote:I had Billy Hamilton hit in 77 straight.
It was in a chicks dig the long ball season.
No pitchers over $1.00

Very interesting! Moose says about posting records: "Records are not accepted from any type of radical theme league where the player pool is limited (all hitting or all pitching theme leagues, etc.)"

So I guess Billy's performance won't pass. Still, if he'd met up with Ken Keltner on a good day, maybe Hamilton would have been stopped a 55?

When I first started playing SOM I noticed all the crazy records as well, except for the hitting streak. I believe its because SOM is completely based on probability and Dimaggio's streak really isn't mathematically possible. I read a book about the streak (called Streak I think) that gave a day by day account starting at about day 25 or 30. If I recall correctly there were a few scorers decisions that extended it into the 40's or even as late as 42 or 43. So basically the Streak added in the human element which doesn't exist in SOM.

Another theory is that even Dimaggio's streak wouldn't qualify for the SOM record books...I haven't looked all that closely but what would the $$ value of the staffs he was facing?

I recall George Brett had like a 80+ game hitting streak for somebody in the 80's mystery card game that was still active when the season ended.

Good stuff!

Brett's best year in the 80s game was really dominant, especially since he was facing realistic pitching talent instead of the mega-stars in ATG.

The thing about Dimaggio's 56 game streak is that he also had a 61 game streak in the minors for the San Francisco Seal, when he was just a kid.

The year was 1933, and DiMaggio was a 19-year-old player in his first season with the Seals. In only his second month, DiMaggio found a groove that kept on going. With hits in 61 games in a row he didn’t just break the minor league record of 49 set by Jack Ness in 1914, he shattered it (as his 56-game hitting streak would shatter Wee Willie Keeler’s 1897 record of 44-games).

Obviously, to create a streak like this it helps to be a great hitter, but I wonder if Dimag had some kind of special talent beyond that to keep up that level of consistency? After Ken Keltner collared those two hot smashes in the game when his hitting streak was broken, IIRC, Dimag got hits in his next 15 consecutive games.