Quote:
Originally Posted by ruth_rookie
Three records that won’t be broken IMHO:
DiMaggio’s 56 game hitting streak
Ryan’s career strikeout total
Ryan’s 7 no hitters. Most pitchers don’t even get one in their entire career. Can you imagine 7?!!
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Interesting because I would think these, except perhaps DiMaggio's, are more likely to be broken now than a lot of other records. Records tend to be broken when the way the game is played changes. Strikeouts are much much more common now than they once were, both for pitchers and hitters, due to reassessments of their value/detriment. For batters, the current view is that you are better off swinging hard and with an uppercut even if you strike out more. Whereas for pitchers, the current thinking is that all pitchers are equal once the ball is put in play, and so the best measurement of a pitcher's value is his strikeouts. So if you can't throw mid-90s they don't even want to scout you. I'm not saying I necessarily agree with this thinking, and I do think it makes the game boring at times, but that is the current thinking. And that thinking lends itself to strikeouts and no-hitters. Scherzer, for instance, seems to flirt with a no-hitter ever time he's out there. The counter to this is that the current thinking is that pitchers shouldn't throw more than 120 pitches a game, or pitch more than every fifth day, which could make it harder to break those records. But there's still a chance. The records that will almost certainly never be broken are those for which changes in the game have completely put them out of reach. For instance, in the deadball era, parks were big, bumpy, and often in weird configurations, and players were playing with tiny gloves. That, and the fact that no one was hitting home runs, led to a lot of triples. Sam Crawford holds the record with 309 career. You are never going to see that broken in modern parks with the kind of fielding we have today. The current active leader is Jose Reyes with 128, and you can bet he's a lot faster than Crawford was. But the game is just different.