The Annotated This Day in Baseball History

May 15th, 1941

Joe DiMaggio gets hit

In and of itself, Joe DiMaggio getting a hit is not, of course, news. DiMaggio would get a hit 192 additional times in 1941 (the best season of his rightly distinguished career) and would get another 2,213 hits for his career, not to mention 54 in the playoffs. The reason today's hit was notable is because it would start DiMaggio's fifty-six game hitting streak. The hitting streak is much discussed, especially whenever someone gets close as a few--Pete Rose, Luis Castillo--have to varying degrees. I tried to think of a new way to look at the streak, something to demonstrate it beyond the (amazing) fact that he went two months getting a hit every game. I finally settled on expressing it as a percentage of the games played. For example, Luis Castillo had his thirty-five game hitting streak in 2002. He played 146 games that season, meaning he had his hitting streak making up just less than a quarter of his season, which is pretty good. In contrast, DiMaggio only played 139 games in 1941, meaning his hitting streak made up over forty percent of his season. That's impressive.

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I apologize for the relative brevity of the entries these past few days. I am getting ready to move back to New York after a year in London and the combination of packing, saying my goodbyes along with the technical issues I've been having has been keeping me from producing my sometimes Anthony Trollope-like entries. I'm back in New York tomorrow, and hope to return to form.