"Unbeatable" season / career records. - Cryolemon's Blog

Cryolemon's Blog

"Unbeatable" season / career records.

Posted on January 20, 2009 at 10:45 AM.

Like I mentioned in my previous blog post, there is only one career record that I consider truly unbeatable, and it might surprise you. Most of these would take some beating, but I think all but the first are just about beatable.

Don Bradman's career average of 99.94 in test cricket

In cricket your batting average is worked out by the number of runs you score divided by the number of times you are out, so being not out in a game really helps your average. Say you batted 10 times, scoring a total of 500 runs, but you were not out in 2 of those games, instead of 50.00 as you'd expect, you're average would be 62.50. Now, on to Bradman. His career average has been called the single greatest achievement in sports history, he played for a long time too, so it's not as if he was brilliant for a short time and it skewed his average. He would have had an average of 100 if he had scored just 4 in his last game, but he scored 0. I think this is the one truly unbeatable record, simply because bowlers have got better and more games are played, which means batsmen get out more. The second place on the average list by the way, goes to Greame Pollock of South Africa with an average of 60.97.

Cy Young's 511 wins in Major League Baseball

Seen as most outside the UK and Austrailia as the sports record, I class this as a very close second to Bradman's record in the likelyhood of being beaten list. He played for 22 years, which is a pretty long career in itself, and he won 30 games in a season 5 times. To beat this record a player would need to win an average of 25.55 games a year for 20 years. This isn't likely, given the recent decline in 20 game winners but if the right player came along on the right team and stayed healthy for long enough it might just be do-able. In a fact that will only interest me, he is 14th on the list of home runs hit by pithcers.

Wilt Chamberlain averaging more than 48 minutes per game for a season

I can't find much info about this at the moment for some reason (feel free to leave a link in the comments) but I have doubts this will be beaten any time soon.

Brett Favre's 269 consecutive regular season starts in the NFL

It says something about this that there have been something like 100 other starting QBs in the NFL since the streak started. He has only failed to finish 7 games through injury. I personally hope he plays next year and beats Jim Marshall's all non-kicker streak.

There are of course many more that I could include, including a lot more Wilt Chamberlain stuff, and numerous Gretzky records. I'll do a part II to this some time.