Unbreakable

Carl Crawford's six stolen bases on Sunday drew a lot of attention, seeing as how he's only the fourth player to do so since 1900. He still needs to do it again to tie Hall of Famer Eddie Collins, who did it twice. Still, with the comparative scarcity of stolen bases in this era, Crawford deserves a round of applause. His fantasy owners will sit up all night doing so ...

Crawford's performance prompted Alex Remington to post a blog entry on Yahoo!'s Big League Stew called "Baseball's most untouchable career record? Close, but not quite," in which he postulates that the career record for triples (variously cited at 309 and 312) set by Hall of Famer "Wahoo" Sam Crawford (no relation to Carl) is safer than Rickey Henderson's 1,406 steals.

I'm not sure that either of those records is remotely approachable, but I do know Remington's post set off a long series of comments that shows people, indeed, still know and care about the storied history of baseball.

I've always contended that the unbreakable Major League Baseball record was set by John Taylor, who pitched 1,727 consecutive innings without being relieved, a streak that was broken in 1906. Today, that's about 1,720 more innings than the typical starting pitcher would go without relief.

But pitching has evolved to the point where many records like that have absolutely no chance of being broken: Cy Young's 511 wins and 750 complete games, Walter Johnson's 110 shutouts and "Iron Man" Joe McGinnity's three complete-game doubleheader victories (that's two per day) in the same month come to mind.

As for batters, Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak usually is cited as the ultimate in unbreakable records. OK, they used to say that about Lou Gehrig's 2,130 consecutive games played, but ... at any rate, the conventional wisdom is that the pressure on a hitter nowadays to get within, say, 20 games of DiMaggio comes to be unbearable.

Just off the top of my head, here are a bunch more hitting records that should stand forever:

- Ty Cobb's .366 (or .367, by some calculations) lifetime batting average

- J. Owen Wilson's 36 triples in one season (no one else in the 20th century hit more than 26)

- Earl Webb's 67 doubles in one season

- Ted Williams' reaching base in 16 consecutive plate appearances

- Hack Wilson's 191 RBI (especially since that extra one was added half a century after his death)

- Rogers Hornsby's .424 batting average (unless you count the sources that had Nap Lajoie hitting .426 in 1901, when foul balls weren't counted as strikes)

- Tommy Holmes leading the league in home runs while striking out fewer than 10 times (28 home runs, 9 strikeouts), which might be the most impressive on this list

- Babe Ruth's career .690 slugging percentage

- Babe Ruth's career 1.164 OPS

- Babe Ruth out-homering every other team in the league (1927)

- Babe Ruth hitting 35 more home runs than the league runner-up

- Babe Ruth tying for the league lead in home runs while winning 13 games as a pitcher

- B. Lamar Bonds' 73 home runs (think about it), not to mention his career 500-plus homers / 500-plus stolen bases

All right, now that we're veering into Bonds territory, enough is enough. But it's good to see that baseball records still spark a lively debate.

By the way, Charles "Ol' Hoss" Radbourne once won 60 games in a season, plus three more in the first World's Series. But that was way back in 1884 ... so can we be sure it really happened?

(There's way too much trivia in this post to ask a trivia question!)