What's the most unbreakable sports record?
On Joe D, Wilt and the rest.
When I was a kid, I was obsessed with baseball. I wasn’t particularly good at the sport — I was tall and could throw hard but was, um, erratic — but I loved it.
I watched every Yankees game on WPIX. I collected baseball cards. (It was something my dad and I did together.) I pored over the record books of the sport.
And I remember distinctly thinking that there were two records in particular that would NEVER be broken:
Hank Aaron’s 755 lifetime home runs
Lou Gehrig’s streak of playing in 2,130 consecutive games.
Obviously, I was wrong. (Dumb kid!)
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Barry Bonds now holds the home run record with 762 and a major asterisk due to allegations of steroid use that dogged the second half of his amazing career. (Aaron is second followed by Babe Ruth at 714.)
And, in September 1995, Cal Ripken Jr. broke Gehrig’s consecutive games played record. Ripken went on to play in 2,632 straight games.
So much for unbreakable records! The truth is that in sports (and life) we should never say, well, “never.”
And yet, we do! We can’t resist!
With the Gehrig and Aaron records now eclipsed, I wondered what are the NEW unbreakable records in sports? What are the marks that sports reporters, historians and fan believe will never be broken? A sampling — in no particular order — are below. What did I miss?
Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak: DiMaggio’s record — set in the 1941 season — is nearing its 85th birthday. And, the truth is that it seems more unlikely to be broken today — with the emphasis shifting from hitting for average to hitting for power — than at any point in recent memory. The last time anyone came anywhere close to DiMaggio’s streak was in 1978 when Pete Rose hit in 44 straight games. No one has broken 40 straight in decades. Paul Molitor (of the Milwaukee Brewers) got to 39 games in 1987 and Jimmy Rollins (of the Philadelphia Phillies) hit in 38 straight — split between the 2005 and 2006 seasons.
Wayne Gretzky’s 2,857 career points: I’ve written recently in this space about the greatness of the Great One. Among his MANY records, this one may well be the most unbreakable. The man in 2nd place — Pittsburgh Penguins great Jaromir Jagr — played 250 games more than Gretzky in his career and still trails the Great One by almost 1,000(!) points. The active player with the most points is the Penguins’ Sidney Crosby with 1,596. But, Crosby, at age 36, has already played in almost 1,300 games — and there is NO way he is going to even come close to passing Gretzky.
Boston Celtics’ 8 straight NBA championships: From 1959-1966, the C’s won the title every single year. The streak began with a 4-0 sweep of the Minnesota Lakers in 1959 and ended with a Game 7 win over the Los Angeles Lakers in 1966. (The Lakers re-located from Minnesota to Los Angeles in 1960.) The closest anyone has come to that record — and it’s not particularly close — is when the Chicago Bulls won three in a row from 1990-1992 and then three more in a row between 1996 and 1998. The Lakers three-peated from 2000-2002. From 2015 to 2018, the Golden State Warriors made the finals in four straight years, winning three — but only twice in a row (2017-2018).
Cy Young’s 749 complete games: Arm care wasn’t, um, much of a thing in the 19th century. Young regularly threw more than 40 complete games in a year in the 1890s and early 1900s. 40! The top 20 pitchers on the list of most complete games ever are all part of that era. Warren Spahn, who clocks in 21st at 382 complete games, is the first pitcher of the sort-of modern era of baseball on the list. (Spahn played all the way into the 1960s.) The active pitcher with the most complete games? Justin Verlander of the Houston Astros. He has 26.
Wilt Chamberlain’s 50-point season average: In the 1961-1962 NBA season, Chamberlain averaged 50.36 points a game. He’s the only player in NBA (or ABA) history to average over 50. He’s also the only player to average over 40 points in a season — which he did in the 1962-1963 season (45 points a game). Chamberlain holds the top four spots in points per game over a season. Michael Jordan is 5th; he averaged just over 37 points a game in the 1986-1987 season for the Chicago Bulls. The only active player in the top 10 is James Harden, who averaged a shade over 36 points a game in the 2018-2019 season.
Jerry Rice’s 22,985 career receiving yards: Rice is not only the career receiving yards leader but also is the only NFL receiver to break the 20,000 yards plateau. Larry Fitzgerald, of the Arizona Cardinals, ended his career with 17,492 yards. No one else has over 16,000. To put Rice’s record in context: He played 20 years, meaning that to equal his record a receiver would need to average 1,150 receiving yards a year for each of those 20 years.
UConn women’s basketball 111-game unbeaten streak: For almost three years from 2014 to 2017, the UConn women’s basketball team never lost. That’s 867 days without losing. And two national championships. Guess whose record they broke? Their own! From 2008-2011 the Huskies won 90 games in a row. The longest winning streak ever in men’s college basketball is 88 by the UCLA Bruins from 1971 -1974.
I think you could make a case for any of these records falling except the complete games. The complete game is dead. In the max effort on every pitch era it is impossible.
Johnny Vander Meer’s record of a no hitter in two consecutive starts. Like Tatis with the grand slams, someone could conceivably tie the record, but nobody will ever pitch 3 no hitters in 3 consecutive starts (heck nobody may ever pitch 3 complete games in a consecutive starts ever again!!).