Was DiMaggio’s single-season hit streak the least likely long streak?

Were there other streaks less likely than Joe's.

Yes, but only one.

If all players had equal ability, then Joe DiMaggio's hit streak would be the least likely by far, simply because it was the longest by far. Think of it this way: no other player in history ever had a 46 game hit streak, but DiMaggio had 11 of them! (Games 1-46 of his famous streak, all the way to games 11-56). He's light years beyond anyone else.

But here's the thing: all players do not have equal ability. The odds against my hitting in two consecutive games would be greater than the odds of DiMaggio hitting in 56. I won't be getting a chance, but unequal ability also affects the odds in the real world.

Hit streaks are a factor of two things:

(1) How likely was a player to hit in each game?

(2) How many games did he play?

In turn, factor one has two components

(1a) How many times did he get to the plate? 

(1b) How likely was he to get a hit each time?

Joe DiMaggio was almost uniquely positioned among modern players to succeed in factor one.

(1a) He played for a great offensive team, and batted near the top of the line-up, so he batted frequently. His likelihood would have been even higher if he had batted lead-off, because he would have come to the plate an additional .33 times per game. That doesn't sound like much, but it would have made his streak four times more likely!

(1b) He was a great hitter who didn't walk much, so he had a high likelihood of getting a hit in each at bat. He was far more likely to get a hit in any given appearance than, for example, Ted Williams, because Williams walked a lot, and walks don't count toward a hit streak.

On the other hand, DiMaggio didn't rank very high on factor two in 1941.

(2) He played in only 139 games, meaning that he only had 84 opportunities for a 56 game single-season streak. Any streak begun in game 85 or later would have to end before it could reach 56.

The great achievement of DiMaggio's streak rests on the power of exponents. Sure, he had an 80% likelihood to get a hit in any given game, but any decimal taken to the 56th power becomes a very small decimal. Even with Joe D's great ability, the odds against that hit streak were about 8000-to-1.

DiMaggio's streak was highly unlikely, even with DiMaggio's hot hitting that year. If you were to replay DiMaggio's season again and again on an infinite loop with our statistical model of his 1941 performance, he would reach 56 or more every 7,797 seasons. It was a statistical anomaly, even with expectations raised in deference to the talent of the great DiMag.

But Uggla's streak was beyond anomalous and into the territory of miraculous. Dan Uggla was less likely to hit in 33 consecutive games than DiMaggio was to hit in 56. Far less likely. About 16 times less likely. In order to match the statistical improbability of Uggla's streak, DiMaggio would have had to hit in 69 consecutive games.

Somehow, Uggla hit in 33 consecutive games despite having relatively few plate appearances per game and a low probability of getting a hit in any one of them. How did it happen? Uggla, a mediocre hitter, simply went on one of the all-time hot streaks. In those 33 games, he batted .377 with 15 homers. During the rest of the year, Uggla batted .194. That 183-point difference is uncanny.

DiMaggio batted .408 during the streak and “only” .321 the rest of the year, but it isn't especially strange for a hitter of DiMaggio's caliber to have a long hot streak in which he maintains a .400 average. In 1939, Joe D was batting .443 for the entire season as late as July 13. The explanation for 1941 is not that Joe D avoided hitless games. He had many of them, 25 to be exact. The magic of 1941 is how those 25 hitless games were distributed. They managed to stay out of the streak. That distribution was rare, but there was really no radical upswing in his performances. It is not unusual for DiMaggio to hit like DiMaggio.

But it is unusual for a .194 hitter to hit like DiMaggio, and Uggla did just that. DiMaggio's OPS was 1.181 during his streak. Uggla's was 1.200 in his.

Nobody can explain it. It just is.

Were there streaks that were predictable?

Yes. Sort of. There was never a streak of 30 or more that was an even money bet, but there were a few that came pretty close,

If the model were to recreate Ed Delahanty's season on that infinite loop I mentioned, it would reveal that Big Ed would post a 30-game streak approximately every five years. While DiMaggio was performing at the top of his game, and Uggla seemed to have signed a short-term pact with Satan, Delahanty was simply conducting business as usual. Yes, he batted .422 during the streak, but he also hit .406 in his other games. That mere 16-point difference compares to 87 for DiMaggio and 183 for Uggla.

Were there individual seasons that were even more streak-friendly, but didn't produce one?

Yes, there is one that really stands out, and a few honorable mentions, but there is nothing in the past hundred years.

Hugh Duffy had the most likely season to produce a 30-game streak. No other season came close. He accumulated nearly five plate appearances per game and got a hit in more than 38% of his plate appearances. Both factors are close to all-time records at the modern pitching distance. He was so efficient in 1894 that he was about an even bet to pull off a 30-game streak, but he did not. He did reach 26.

Of the eight seasons most likely to produce a 30-game hit streak, only three actually did.

Note that George Sisler has two seasons on the list. His 1920 season did not produce a 30-game streak, but his 1922 season more than made up for it with a 41-game streak, which remained the 20th-century record until DiMaggio obliterated it in 1941, and still ranks third in the century behind DiMaggio and Pete Rose.

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FOOTNOTE:

The calculation is season-based, not streak-based. In other words:

* It calculates how often how often the characteristics of a particular season will produce a streak of 56 games or more. In DiMaggio's case, such a streak will occur every 7,797 years

* It does not calculate the frequency of 56-game streaks. One DiMaggio streak will occur on the average, every 1,554 years. This is because some years will include multiple streaks of exactly 56 games. They come in clumps. A 57-game streak, for example, is by definition two 56-game streaks, one from game 1 through game 56 and one from game 2 through game 57. In that sense, as noted at the beginning of the article, DiMaggio has 11 streaks of 46 or more. While this is mathematically correct, it is not especially useful information, since we think of DiMaggio's streak simply as 56 games, not as 11 consecutive 46-game streaks.

Thus, in 100,000 such seasons:

* There will be 64 streaks of exactly 56 games (one per 1554).

BUT

* There will be only 13 seasons including a streak of 56 or longer (one every 7997).

The Mount Rushmore of baseball names

I call it Mount Blushmore, the truly embarrassing names.

Baseball is known for colorful monikers, so there have been many to chose from. Too many to single out just four. But four is the number of the mountain. The four presidents carved on Rushmore allow for debate, as do the four names enshrined on Blushmore.

Tony Suck

Ugly Dickshot

Cuckoo Christy

Pebbly Jack Glasscock

I discussed the apotheosis of those names and the men behind them here.

Leon "Lee" Riley

In the HBO series Winning Time, the actor playing Pat Riley, the ultra-successful coach of the Los Angeles Lakers, walks around with his dad's fire-damaged bat. The implication is that Pat rescued the bat after his dad had tried to burn it. The dad in question was outfielder Leon (Lee) Riley, whose story was really emblematic of an era in American sports that no longer exists. From the 19th century until about the 1960s, it was possible to be a career minor league ballplayer, thrilling small-town fans with athletic heroics in the summer, while working anonymous, pedestrian jobs in the off-season. Lee Riley was such a man.

His career got off to a promising start at age 20, when he found himself in single-A ball in his first year as a professional, by-passing all the lower levels except for a very brief stint (23 games) in class D. In his first full season in the tough Western League, he tore it up at the plate, batting .370 with a plethora of extra base hits.

He performed so well at such a young age that he attracted the attention of baseball's premiere strategist, Connie Mack, whose Philadelphia A's were just about to overtake Babe Ruth's Yankees as the best team in the American League. Mack purchased the young star's contract (see article to the left) on a conditional basis, but ultimately changed his mind. The A's were already deep in talent, and Riley needed more seasoning. He was a gifted natural hitter, but he had a lot to learn about the game. Moreover, his arm was weak, and his fielding was inept. As one observer put it, "He batted .375 but his fielding average was just about the same. He couldn't field pumpkins if they were tied in a sack." 

Riley understood his limitations, and he was willing to put in the time and effort to overcome them. It took longer than expected, but he worked and worked on his fielding until he earned a well-deserved promotion to the Rochester Red Wings, the top farm club of the St. Louis Cardinals, with his major league dream within his grasp. 

And then he ran smack into the Peter Principle, which suggests that each person rises until he reaches his level of incompetence. For Lee Riley that level was the International League. He batted only .276 with no power at Rochester, in an age when just about every major league outfielder batted .300 or better against actual major league pitching. It was especially difficult to break into the St. Louis Cardinals' line-up. The 1930 St. Louis Cardinals were the highest-scoring NL team of the 20th century. They had 13 players with 100 at bats or more, and twelve of them batted in the .300s.

At that point in his career, Lee had had the bad fortune to get his two potential major league opportunities with the two teams that needed him the least! When Leon Riley went to Rochester, the hard-hitting Cardinals were the defending World Series champions, and it was soon obvious that Lee could not fit into their major league plans. 

How did his performance drop so dramatically from class-A ball to AA? Lee himself said that it was because he couldn't hit lefties at that level. That formed the basis for one of Tommy Lasorda's best anecdotes, as recounted in the L.A. Times, July 13, 1988:

When Tom Lasorda was pitching for Schenectady of the Canadian-American League in 1948, the manager was Lee Riley, father of Laker Coach Pat Riley.

"We were playing Gloversville, and I’ve got ‘em beat, 2-1, and it’s in the top of the ninth inning. As I go out to pitch, Riley, who was coaching third, came to the mound, picked up the ball to hand it to me and he says to me, 'You’re in good shape. You’ve got three left-handed hitters in a row.’ And I was a left-handed pitcher, which meant things should be easy.

First left-hander doubles. Next left-hander triples. Next left-hander doubles. And now they’re winning, 3-2. And he comes to take me out, and as he starts to take the ball from my hand, he looks at me and he says, 'Know why I couldn’t hit in the major leagues?' I thought that was a very unusual question, but I said, 'No, Skip. No, why?' And he said, 'Because I couldn’t hit left-handed pitchers. But if you’d been there, I’d have been a star.'"

But an equally cogent explanation was given by sportswriter Whitney Martin: Lee could not hit the curve at that level. 

Whatever the explanation for Lee's failure, the fact remained that the Cards had sent him to the Rochester Red Wings with high hopes and much fanfare, but were so disappointed with him that they optioned him out even when it left the Rochester club desperately short of outfielders.

The Cards would soon match their offensive juggernaut with some great pitching in the form of the Dean brothers, so the legendary Gas House Gang was formed, and another championship banner would soon be flying in St. Louis. By then, Lee Riley would be languishing in a C league.

That's how his life went. He'd have a couple of good years, earn another promotion, then find himself back at a lower level than when he started. By the time 1938 rolled around, he was a 31-year-old veteran of 12 minor league seasons, but was in D ball with the 19 year olds, playing full-time while also acting as the team's manager. 

His D-league assignment, with a Dodgers farm club in the Nebraska State League, happened to be very close to his own home town, and it could not have been a more popular homecoming, particularly because he once again absolutely tore it up at that low level, batting .365 and .372 in his two years there.

His hot bat had granted him his fondest wish, yet another promotion to the International League as a player, this time with a Dodgers farm club in Baltimore. Unfortunately, that wish had unintended consequences, like the ones in the classic cautionary tale, "The Monkey's Paw." The fulfillment of that wish came with an ironic and crushing twist. Riley had stalled out his evolving managerial career for a pipe dream - the hope that he could now somehow hit International League pitching, despite the harsh lesson of his prior failure. The result was even more disappointing than his first trip through that league. In 38 games he batted .212 with one homer. 

It was back to square one again.

By then he must have understood that a shot at the majors was only a dream, but baseball was his job and he was no quitter, so he accepted another demotion, and resolved to seek a managerial job in earnest. He soon found himself as a player/manager in a C league, where he had his best season to date, batting .391 with a league-leading 32 homers in the obscure Canadian-American League.

Given his track record, a solid performance at such a low level would not normally have led him back on a path to the majors, especially since his subsequent performance was disappointing, but fate intervened, in the form of Adolph Hitler. America needed able-bodied young men to fight in WW2, including young ballplayers. While many of the best and youngest major leaguers went to bat for Uncle Sam, the desperate major league teams were looking for bodies to fill out their depleted squads. 

By 1944 and 1945, after years of war, roster spots had opened for all sorts of players who would not otherwise have been able to qualify for major league squads. There was a one-armed outfielder (Pete Gray, below center), a 15-year-old pitcher (Joe Nuxhall, below right), and a variety of older players who would otherwise have been retired, like Paul Waner, once a great star with the Pirates, hanging on in wartime as a grizzled Brooklyn Dodger (below left). In those segregated, pre-Robinson years, the Cincinnati Reds even snuck a black pitcher onto their roster, and nobody really paid attention.

During the desperate hunt for major league ballplayers in the late war years, the primary beneficiaries were career minor leaguers desperate for a shot at the big show.

Players like Leon Riley.

There have rarely been less likely major leaguers. In 1942 he had batted .204 in a B league. In 1943 he was working in a defense plant. By 1944 he was 37 years old, had been out of pro baseball entirely in the preceding year, had never succeeded at any level higher than single-A ball, and had not even had a good single-A season in about a decade. 

He had, however, the most important qualification any baseball player could have in 1944: he was available. He could not be drafted because he was too old and had a family to support, so at an age when most major leaguers have retired, he became a rookie on the 1944 Phillies.

The popular film Field of Dreams tells the story of a promising young major leaguer called Archibald "Moonlight" Graham. He was more commonly called "Doc" Graham by his teammates, because he mixed baseball with medical school,and eventually became a successful and much-loved doctor. Archie Graham once got the thrill of standing in the outfield as a New York Giant in a major league game, but always regretted that he never got a chance to show what he could do in the big leagues with a bat in his hand. While Graham had to have been disappointed by his career trajectory in baseball, he was always able to maintain the belief that he could have done the job with the Giants, if given the chance. Leon Riley was not so fortunate. After two decades of trying to get a shot at major league pitchers, he found out once and for all that he really couldn't hit them. Despite the fact that he was facing only the diluted wartime pitching of 1944, he batted an embarrassing .083.

The Phils demoted him to the Utica Blue Sox, roughly the American equivalent of exile to Siberia. 

The next year he found himself back in D ball yet again, playing against kids who could be his children, starting from the lowest player-manager level for the third time in his career, hoping once again to move up the managerial ladder. He was not a man who gave up easily, so he stubbornly lasted five more years in the low minors as a player/manager in the Phillies' farm system. As a player, he would never again reach as high as single-A, the level where he had played in his very first year, nearly a quarter of a century earlier.

When he finally stopped playing, he stayed in the Phillies' organization as a full-time minor league manager, and was awarded some promotions until he was finally back in class A, as manager of the Phillies' Eastern League teams in 1950 and 1951. The Phillies did a bit of manager-swapping in 1952, and Riley found himself managing the Wilmington Blue Rocks, who posed a respectable 72-66 record in the Interstate League. Unfortunately, the economics of baseball were changing. The Wilmington Blue Rocks went belly up, and the entire Interstate League collapsed. Facing a dwindling bottom line, the Phillies announced after the 1952 season that they were trimming their farm system from 12 teams to 9. Along with many others, Leon Riley lost his job that day, his baseball odyssey complete after 11 years as a manager, and a playing career that spanned 22 summers. He had accumulated more than 2,400 hits in pro baseball, including about 900 for extra bases, in the process of compiling a .314 lifetime average. At various times he had led minor leagues in doubles, triples, home runs, walks, RBI and batting average. He had once managed a team to a pennant. He had always done what was asked of him, having played D ball at age 20, then again at age 30, and finally at age 39. Despite his loyalty and hard work, he found himself unemployed at 46, with no non-baseball job skills. Feeling betrayed and abandoned, he went up to his attic and discarded all of his memorabilia dating back to the mid-20s, symbolically casting baseball out of his life, as documented by the eyewitness testimony of his son, the future Lakers coach. 

And that brings us back to the scene described at the beginning of this article. As the story goes, Pat Riley rescued his dad's bat that day, preserved it, and treasured what it meant to his family's history.

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Two of Leon Riley's children became professional athletes, albeit neither of them in baseball. 

Pat Riley was a solid back-up player on one of the greatest basketball teams ever assembled, the 1971-72 Los Angeles Lakers, who finished the regular season 69-13 and breezed through the playoffs to the championship. Using their peak roster, if all players had been in their primes at the time, their starting five might have been the greatest ever assembled: Wilt Chamberlain, Elgin Baylor, Jerry West, Gail Goodrich and Happy Hairston. Pat Riley wasn't about to crack that line-up, but he was a dependable role player who carved out a 10-year career in the NBA. 

I'm sure that you already know about his coaching career, which is one of the  greatest in history.

Pat's much older brother, Lee Riley, chose football as his primary sport. He was a solid defensive back with a 7-year career in the NFL and AFL, and once led the league in interceptions. He was also used on special teams to return both punts and kickoffs.

After his pro career, he left the sports word and became a corporate vice-president.