Extending long hitting streaks in the same game
From SABR member Tom Ruane at Retrosheet on November 29, 2011:
While writing another article, I noticed that on April 18, 1931, Freddie Lindstrom and Mel Ott both extended long hitting streaks at the Baker Bowl, Lindstrom hitting in his 36th straight game there and Ott in his 29th straight. Of course, a hitting streak in a specific ball park is a rather obscure record and I’m sure few if any people knew about it at the time. The story in The New York Times the next day didn’t mention it.
But that got me to wondering about whether or not there were other long hitting streaks of the normal variety, the ones newspaper reporters do like to write about, that were extended in the same game. Well, I didn’t find a pair as long as 29 consecutive games from 1918 to 2011, but I came close. A little more than a month after the game mentioned above, Earle Combs and Al Simmons both got hits to push their hitting streaks to 27 and 26 games, respectively. As expected, these streaks were mentioned in the game story in the next day’s New York Times.
The teams would end their six-game series that day, and the two would go hitless a few games after that. Here are the longest pairs I found.
Read the full article here: http://www.retrosheet.org/Research/RuaneT/retro_fun2.htm#A111129
Originally published: November 30, 2011. Last Updated: November 30, 2011.