Baseball: "Chase"ing Dimaggio

How about the 35 game hit streak for Chase Utley?

I think hes got a good 4 or 5 games left in him, how about all of you in here?

I agree that he will have 4 or 5 more games in him to reach 40... but I think that's it.

It annoyed me greatly when, on another board of someone I kinda know, the site writer wrote something, not on the site, but in an e-mail, of how Chase Utley is a nobody noone has ever heard of and how he seriously needs to get checked for roids, since he believe somes nobody player cannot do what he has done.

How did I know that as soon as I post something about it, that the streak would end? In memory, I have ended 5 different streaks. I also posted about Castillo's when he reached 35, I duno if it was on this site, but that day is streak ended... maybe I should just stop posting anytime a major streak is going.

Well, it's over at 35 games.

I think that with the increased media coverage these days, breaking a record like DiMaggio's hit streak is virtually impossible. By the time a guy gets to 30 nowadays, people start asking the question, "Can he break DiMaggio's record?" The focus intensifies and the players just can't deal with the pressure. I don't remember Pete Rose's 44 game streak, but I do remember the longest since then, Paul Molitor's 39 in 1987. The media attention was crazy at that time, and now it's really wild with the Internet. If anyone ever breaks that record, I will have to really have to tip my hat to him because that will be a monumental achievement.

I, of course, remember when Rose had his streak. I believe it was Atlanta reliever Gene Garber who ended it. With a typical lack of class, Rose whimpered after the game, "He was pitching like it was the 7th Game of the World Series." Garber responded, "Well, he was hitting like it was the 7th Game of the World Series."

A 56-game hit streak is like throwing a perfect game with only 2 K's: It requires a gargantuan amount of luck--even if you have at least one AB per game where you really scorch the ball. But I agree with you that it would be very hard to do in this day and age, with the absurd amount of media heat. Under that heat, it could get real tough to scorch the ball every game, even once or twice, and you'd be awfully lucky to maintain a hit streak on seeing-eye grounders and bloop singles.

BHN