Joe DiMaggio hit safely in 56 consecutive games between 15 May and 16 July 1941. Across those 56 games he came to bat 223 times and struck out five times.
That is the number that should stop you. Not the 56, which everyone knows, but the five. A modern hitter strikes out roughly once every four at-bats. DiMaggio, in the most scrutinised two months any hitter has ever played, went down on strikes once every 45 at-bats while hitting .408 with 15 home runs.
The record has stood for 85 years. Nobody has been within twelve games of it since 1941, and nobody has reached even 30 games since 2016. This is the full list, and the arithmetic of why it keeps getting further away.
Joe DiMaggio, 56 games, 1941
The line for the streak itself:
| | | |---|---| | Games | 56 | | At bats | 223 | | Hits | 91 | | Average | .408 | | Home runs | 15 | | Runs batted in | 55 | | Walks | 21 | | Strikeouts | 5 |
He was 26 years old. The streak began on 15 May, when the Yankees were in fourth place, and ended on 16 July in Cleveland.
What makes it more than a curiosity is that it was not a run of scratch singles. He hit .408 during it, 51 points above his own excellent season average, with more home runs than strikeouts by a factor of three. He was not surviving. He was in the best form of his life for two months without a single off day.
The 16 games after
The part that gets left out: the day the streak ended, DiMaggio went 0 for 3.
Then he hit safely in the next 16 games in a row.
He did not get a hit on 17 July, and did not fail to get one again until 3 August. Counted properly, DiMaggio hit safely in 72 of 73 games. Had one ground ball found a gap on that Wednesday in Cleveland, the record would read 73 and no serious person would ever have discussed breaking it.
Pete Rose, 44 games, 1978
Rose is second, twelve games back, between 14 June and 31 July 1978. He was 37 years old.
Twelve games is an enormous margin for a record of this kind. It is the difference between two weeks of baseball. Rose had the longest streak of the last 90 years and finished closer to the twentieth name on this list than to DiMaggio.
George Sisler, 41, and Ty Cobb, 40
Sisler hit in 41 straight in 1922 for the St Louis Browns, from 27 July to 17 September. Cobb managed 40 in 1911, from 15 May to 2 July.
Those two, with DiMaggio and Rose, are the entire membership of the 40-game club. Four men in 125 years.
Paul Molitor, 39, and Tommy Holmes, 37
Molitor's 39-game run in 1987 is the longest since Rose and the longest of the last forty years. He hit .415 across it, 68 hits in 164 at-bats, and he did it as a 30-year-old designated hitter having the best season of his career. He struck out 22 times during the streak, which is four times DiMaggio's rate over a shorter run, and is a fair measure of how much the sport had already changed by 1987.
Tommy Holmes went 37 straight for the Boston Braves in 1945, and his streak contains the one number that beats DiMaggio's. Holmes hit .423 during it, 66 hits in 156 at-bats, and struck out twice. Not twice a week. Twice, in 37 games.
The full 1945 season is stranger still. Holmes led the National League in home runs with 28. He struck out 9 times.
Nine. All year. He hit 28 home runs and struck out nine times, finishing with 224 hits and a .352 average, and he is not in the Hall of Fame.
No hitter has finished a season with three times as many home runs as strikeouts since the game started keeping pitchers who throw 98. It is not a record anyone is chasing because it is not a thing anyone can now do.
The Rollins asterisk
Jimmy Rollins appears on the list at 36 games, which is where the 2005 season ran out on him.
He opened 2006 with a hit on 3 April and another on 5 April before going 0 for 4 on the 6th, so the run reached 38 consecutive games in which he played and got a hit. It is usually cited that way.
Both numbers are defensible and they answer different questions. Streaks here are counted within a season, which is the record book's convention and the reason Willie Keeler is listed at 44 rather than 45. By that standard Rollins had 36. By the continuous-games standard he had 38, and either way he is the best of the last thirty years.
Every streak of 33 games or more since 1901
| Games | Player | Season | |---|---|---| | 56 | Joe DiMaggio | 1941 | | 44 | Pete Rose | 1978 | | 41 | George Sisler | 1922 | | 40 | Ty Cobb | 1911 | | 39 | Paul Molitor | 1987 | | 37 | Tommy Holmes | 1945 | | 36 | Jimmy Rollins | 2005 | | 35 | Luis Castillo | 2002 | | 35 | Ty Cobb | 1917 | | 35 | Chase Utley | 2006 | | 34 | Benito Santiago | 1987 | | 34 | Dom DiMaggio | 1949 | | 34 | George McQuinn | 1938 | | 34 | George Sisler | 1925 | | 33 | Rogers Hornsby | 1922 | | 33 | Dan Uggla | 2011 | | 33 | Hal Chase | 1907 | | 33 | Heinie Manush | 1933 |
Two names on that list deserve a second look.
Dom DiMaggio, at 34 games in 1949, is Joe's younger brother. The two longest streaks in one family, eight years apart.
Benito Santiago's 34 in 1987 came in his rookie season, as a catcher, which is the hardest position from which to do this. Catchers sit, and a streak cannot survive many days off in a hot stretch. He was also 22.
Willie Keeler, and the streak that came first
The record DiMaggio broke belonged to Wee Willie Keeler, who hit safely in 44 straight games during the 1897 season for the Baltimore Orioles. Counting the final game of 1896, the run reaches 45.
That distinction matters because it is the same one this list uses. Streaks here are measured within a single season, which is the convention the record book follows, and it is why Keeler is usually cited at 44 and occasionally at 45.
Keeler's mark stood for 44 years. DiMaggio passed it on 2 July 1941 and then kept going for another two weeks.
What a hitting streak actually requires
Take a genuinely good hitter, a .300 average, and give him four at-bats a night. The chance he fails to get a hit in a given game is .700 to the fourth power, which is 24 percent. So he gets a hit about 76 percent of the time.
Run that 56 times in a row and the probability is roughly one in 4.7 million.
That figure is illustrative rather than exact, because a real hitter faces different pitchers, sits some days, and sometimes bats only three times. But it gives the right shape. A .300 hitter playing 150 games a year would expect a 56-game streak roughly never. DiMaggio hit .357 in 1941, which improves the odds considerably, and it was still the only time it has happened.
The other thing the arithmetic shows is where the danger is. It is not the good games. It is the nights a hitter bats three times instead of five, or draws two walks, or faces an ace. Every streak on this list contains two or three games that came down to a final at-bat.
The modern drought
Ten players have had a 30-game hitting streak since 2000:
| Games | Player | Season | |---|---|---| | 36 | Jimmy Rollins | 2005 | | 35 | Chase Utley | 2006 | | 35 | Luis Castillo | 2002 | | 33 | Dan Uggla | 2011 | | 30 | Freddie Freeman | 2016 | | 30 | Andre Ethier | 2011 | | 30 | Ryan Zimmerman | 2009 | | 30 | Moises Alou | 2007 | | 30 | Willy Taveras | 2006 | | 30 | Albert Pujols | 2003 |
The last one was Freddie Freeman, ten years ago. The last streak of 35 or more was Chase Utley's, twenty years ago. In the whole of baseball history there have been 41 streaks of 30 games or longer, and four of 40 or longer, and the sport has not produced one of either kind in a decade.
Why it keeps getting harder
Three things have moved against the streak, and none of them is about hitters being worse.
Strikeouts. League strikeout rate has climbed from 3.12 per nine innings in the 1920s to 8.65 in the 2020s, a shift covered in full in our piece on the all-time strikeout list. A strikeout is the one outcome with no chance of a hit attached, and the modern hitter gets a lot more of them. DiMaggio's five strikeouts in 56 games is not just a nice detail, it is the mechanism.
Bullpens. A hitter in 1941 saw the same starting pitcher three or four times in a night. A hitter now sees a starter twice and then two or three relievers, each fresh, each throwing harder than the man before. The fourth at-bat, which is where streaks get saved, is now the hardest one of the game.
Rest. Teams sit their regulars far more deliberately than they used to. A scheduled day off is fatal to a streak in a way that has nothing to do with how anyone is hitting.
Put those together and the modern 30-game streak is roughly as rare as the 40-game streak used to be. DiMaggio's 56 was extraordinary in 1941. In 2026 it is barely in the same conversation as what is possible.
The MVP argument of 1941
DiMaggio won the American League Most Valuable Player award in 1941, hitting .357 with 30 home runs.
Ted Williams hit .406 that season with 37 home runs, and finished second.
Nobody has hit .400 in the 85 years since, which makes 1941 the year that produced both of the sport's two unreachable hitting marks, in the same league, with the two men finishing first and second in the voting. Williams had the better season by most measures anyone would use now. DiMaggio had the streak, and the streak is what the voters were watching.
What the record really is
Most of the great counting records in baseball are durability records. The hit list rewards the man who played the most games. The strikeout list rewards the pitcher who was handed the ball the most times.
The hitting streak is the exception. It cannot be accumulated, cannot be padded across twenty seasons, and cannot be reached by showing up. It is the one record that requires a player to be at his best for two months without a single bad night, and that is why it has survived almost nine decades of people trying.
Fifty-six is the number to beat, and it is the number our daily streak game is scored against. See how far you can run it in The Streak, or work through a player's career one club at a time in MLB Career Path.