End of DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak changed lives forever
On this day seventy years ago, Joe DiMaggio’s hitting streak of fifty-six games came to an end. Kostya Kennedy wrote a piece for Sports Illustrated on the game:
The outs are famous now, two of them anyway: the plays by third baseman Ken Keltner, a gold glover had there been such a thing back then. Twice — in the first inning and again in the seventh — Keltner dived to his left, into foul ground, to glove hard ground balls down the line and take doubles away from DiMaggio. The plays at first base were bang-bang close and DiMaggio believed that the wet ground (it had rained heavily the night before) had slowed his stride, costing him.
Keltner played DiMaggio on the edge of the outfield grass. On either at-bat Joe could have dropped down a bunt and made it to first base at a trot. That was just not something he would do, not even with The Streak on the line. (“Is DiMaggio a good bunter?” Yanks manager Joe McCarthy was once asked. “We’ll never know,” he said.)
The next-longest streak in the major leagues belongs to Willie Keeler, who hit in forty-five straight games across the 1896 and 1897 seasons. That’s eleven fewer games. In the seventy years since the streak, only one person has broken forty games: Pete Rose hit in forty-four straight in 1978.
What’s reported a little less frequently is that, the day after his streak was broken, DiMaggio would start a sixteen-game streak. That means that he hit in seventy-two of seventy-three consecutive games. Jaw-dropping.