January 29, 2007
The Strangeness of Sports Records: Seven Questions for Allen St. John Posted by Allen Barra at 04:35 PM EST Allen St. John writes the “By the Numbers” column for The Wall Street Journal and is the author of Clapton’s Guitar: Watching Wayne Henderson Build the Perfect Instrument. His latest book, Made to Be Broken: The 50 Greatest Records and Streaks in Sports (Triumph Books) deals not only with the greatest achievements in sports but with America’s obsession with big numbers. I recently talked with him about this.
Not to turn you into an amateur sociologist, but what do you think is behind American sports fans’ obsession with breaking records?
Records and record-keeping are really what make a sport a sport. Why is golf a sport, but ballet isn’t? It’s not about athleticism, it’s about competing and keeping score. It’s about who’s better and who’s best. And in this context, a great record is a dare. It a taunting voice from the past that says, “Hey, top this—if you can.”
Does it seem to you sometimes as if many fans don't even know about the existence of a particular record until someone is about to break it?
The most relevant records are the ones that are at least in some danger of being broken. No one cares about the record for triples in a season. It’s not that Chief Wilson is better than Jose Reyes; it’s that the stadiums and the game have changed so much that even the fastest players of today have no shot at hitting 36 triples or anything close to it. On the other hand a record that gets broken a couple of times a year—like world records in swimming and speed skating—seems cheap and disposable. The best records get broken every now and then, but they don’t go down without a fight.
In recent years, numerous record have been broken that no one would have thought possible just a few years ago. Is there really any such thing as a record that can never be broken, and if, so, what would your top nominations be?
Before last season, nobody would have thought that a contemporary player could break Wilt Chamberlain’s record of scoring 100 points in an NBA game. But in the process of scoring 81 against Toronto, Kobe Bryant actually scored a higher percentage of his team’s points than Wilt did. So all of a sudden the NBA single game scoring record seems a lot more vulnerable than it did only 18 months ago.
One of the records that people always refer to as being unbreakable is Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak. While it’s stood for a very long time, I think it’s much more vulnerable than most fans think. After all, against top college competition, Robin Ventura managed to put together a 58-game hitting streak. And right now we’re in a period where the game is being played in hitters’ parks and a lot of runs are being scored, which translates into more plate appearances per game. That said, if the record does get broken, I don’t think it’s going to be by an all-time great like Albert Pujols or A-Rod. I think it’s much more likely to be a guy who’ll be able to get 30 games under his belt while flying under the radar, like Jimmie Rollins or Luis Castillo.
My vote for the all-time most unbreakable record? Johnny Van Dermeer’s record for consecutive no-hitters. To break it a guy would have to throw three no-hitters in a row. That’s an easy way to win a bar bet, right there.
Is there perhaps a different definition of what constitutes a record now than in decades past? I’m thinking of two things. First, several years ago when Larry Holmes looked like he might win 49 consecutive fights, many in the sports press began saying that he had a chance to break Marciano’s “record” of 49-0. But I never heard Marciano or anyone else talk about going 49-0 as a record until Holmes began to approach it. I’m also thinking of when Jose Canseco hit 40 home runs and stole 40 bases in the same season, the first player ever to do so, and Mickey Mantle commented, “If I’d-a known they were going to make such a fuss about it, I’d-a done it.” I think there’s a point to what Mantle was saying. Aren’t some of what we call records basically media creations?
No doubt, and it’s not a new phenomenon. When DiMaggio was on his hot streak in 1941, they actually had to go back and figure out that Wee Willie Keeler held the hitting streak record. It wasn't common knowledge. The consecutive games streak wasn’t a big deal when Gehrig broke Everett Scott’s mark, but for better or worse it was a national event when Ripken passed Gehrig. But a year later, when Ripken broke the world record held by Sachio Kinugasa of the Hiroshima Carp, there were only about half a dozen of us who noticed. Part of it, of course, is that we simply have more stats and better research at our disposal now. But the bottom line is that all records aren’t equally important, and it’s up to the fans—and the media—to decide which ones really resonate.
One of the best things about Made to Be Broken is that you cover every major sport from team sports to NASCAR, golf, and tennis. Some are obvious while some are not so but deserve to be—for instance, I didn’t know until I read your book that the Soviet gymnast Larissa Latynina won more Olympic medals than any other athlete in Olympic history. Which of these unsung records do you find most interesting?
There are a few records that I particularly like. In baseball, what is every hitter’s goal when he comes to the plate? It is, one way or another, to come around and score. Well, that’s what Rickey Henderson did 2,295 times, more than any other player in major league history. Ty Cobb set the old record back in 1925, and every great player in baseball history—Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio, Williams, Stan Musial, Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle—had a chance to break the record but couldn’t. And yet when Rickey broke the record it was the third biggest baseball story of the week, behind Barry Bonds’s seventieth homer and Tony Gwynn’s impending retirement.
You can’t help but be impressed with the résumé of Michael Schumacher, the Formula One driver. He owns every significant record—wins, championships, points—in a tremendously competitive sport. But even though he’s the highest salaried athlete in the history of the world, no one in American knows who he is.
The last one that I really like is Mike Austin and the longest drive in pro golf history. He was a 64-year-old teaching pro, but in the U.S. Senior Open in Las Vegas in 1974 he whacked a ball 515 yards, farther than Tiger Woods or John Daly ever did. And this wasn’t a fluke. Austin was a real pioneer in swing theory, but his short game was so bad that his best pro finish was thirty-seventh. In a way, that hole was a microcosm of his career. Austin drove past the green and three putted, so the longest drive in the history of professional golf only set him up for a bogey.
I noticed that you put Cal Ripken, Jr.’s consecutive-games streak last on your list of 50. Many fans would argue that it should be number one on the list. Why so low?
This one’s a huge pet peeve of mine. I only included Ripken’s record to make the argument against it. I see this as a glorified perfect attendance record, like that weird kid in your homeroom who came to school with whooping cough just so he wouldn’t be marked absent. A meaningful record should represent an aspect of excellence in the game. Well, I think there’s no question that Mr. Ripken and the Orioles would have been better off if he had taken a few days off. If you graph the career of most hitters, it looks like a bell curve. They get better and better every year, reach a peak in their mid- to late twenties, and then begin a decline. Ripken’s career looks more like a ski slope. He had his best year in 1983 at age 22, winning the MVP and his team winning the World Series, and from there—with the exception of his second MVP year in 1990—he began a long slow decline. And the Orioles were just a few games over .500 during his streak and made the playoffs only twice. The longer the streak went on, the worse Ripken played. It has always struck me as truly amazing that a player can be allowed to put his pursuit of a record ahead of the team. And because of his lunch-pail image, Ripken never got called on it. Sports columnists are so quick to criticize the high school kid who scores 100 points in a game against an overmatched opponent or a guy like Rickey Davis, the NBA player who took a shot at the opposing basket with the game out of reach so that he could get a rebound and complete his first triple double. These guys were putting themselves ahead of the game, but they were doing it in garbage time. Ripken cost his team games year after year, and cost himself—and us—a chance to see if he could top Honus Wagner as the greatest shortstop ever. Ripken gets my vote as the most selfish player in baseball history.
If you could look into a crystal ball at an edition of Made To Be Broken from the year, say, 2027, what new records would be likely to have been added to the contents?
A lot of sports fans tend to look at the record book as the canon. But as I’ve said before, I think that many records are more vulnerable than we imagine. Only with hindsight do we see how it’s possible. I think the state of the game determines which records are vulnerable, and right now baseball is in a hitter-friendly phase, football has placed an increased emphasis on passing, and hockey is moving toward an era of shooting and scoring instead of clutching and grabbing. So I think all the records at the top of the list are vulnerable. The baseball home run record could trade hands several times, even after Bonds passes Aaron. Jerry Rice knew that Randy Moss was on record pace for many receiving records, which is why Rice tried to hang on as long as he did. Could Sidney Crosby challenge Wayne Gretzky’s records? It’ll be fun to watch.
One other huge wild card: advances in sports science. Sport medicine is already allowing players to have longer careers, so they don’t go limping out of the game in their early thirties the way Mickey Mantle did. On the other hand, while sports have been very quick to declare victory in the war on performance-enhancing drugs, the reality is that each succeeding generation of performance-enhancing drugs is more effective and harder to detect. And gene doping could change the landscape in ways that we simply can’t comprehend now.
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