Does Joe DiMaggio's Streak Deserve an Asterisk?

Oct. 7, 2007 — -- October is the month of baseball's World Series, so it is an appropriate time to consider "56*," an article just published in the Canadian magazine Walrus. In it author David Robbeson asks, "Was Joe DiMaggio's fifty-six-game hitting streak the greatest feat in all of sports or merely a product of its time?"

The article strongly suggests that DiMaggio's legendary record might deserve an asterisk similar to that many have attached to Barry Bonds' recent breaking of Henry Aaron's home run record.

Robbeson's argument, which has been made before but never, I think, so thoroughly, revolves around one Dan Daniel.

Daniel was a baseball writer who had covered the Yankees for a long time, was a personal friend of many of the players, traveled with the team and submitted his expenses to it. He was also the official home-game scorer for the Yankees. He decided, among other things, whether any at-bat should be adjudged a hit by the batter or an error by the fielder, yet he was, in Robbeson's words, "as much a PR man as a reporter."

Specifically, Robbeson cites two games in the middle of the streak, the 30th and 31st, when DiMaggio managed just one hit. In each of these games, the hit was suspect and could well have, and perhaps should have, been deemed an error.

The first involved a bad bounce that hit off the shoulder of shortstop Luke Appling after he reached for it. Hits and errors were not immediately recorded on the scoreboard so, Robbeson writes, some spectators believed the streak had come to an end. Daniel, however, called it a hit.

The 31st game of the streak involved a fielding play that was also arguably an error on the part of Appling, who got his glove on the ball, but dropped it. Again Daniel scored it a hit.

How could this have happened without arousing more controversy? Robbeson argues that despite the present Olympian status of the streak, at the time American involvement in World War II was looming and attention to the then-29-game streak and its fluky extension was not intense and baseball attendance was quite low. Amazingly, the attendance in 22 of the games during the streak was less than 10,000.

http://www.walrusmagazine.com/articles/2007.10-joe-dimaggio-56-games/

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/4337

John Allen Paulos, a professor of mathematics at Temple University, is the author of the best-sellers "Innumeracy" and "A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper," as well as of the forthcoming (in December) "Irreligion." His "Who's Counting?" column on ABCNEWS.com appears the first weekend of every month.