Plain English with Derek Thompson - The Great Debate: What's the Single Most Amazing Sports Statistic in U.S. History?

Episode Date: February 18, 2022

Wilt Chamberlain’s 100-point game. Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hit streak. Jerry Rice's gazillion receiving records. Which of these athletic achievements is the most impressive in American sports history? And are any of them the most impressive ever? The Ringer's Ryen Russillo joins the pod to debate the most impressive achievements in football, basketball, baseball, and individual sports. Then, after making selections that will almost certainly infuriate at least half of all listeners, the guys compare the GOATs across sports to name the single most impressive accomplishment ever. (Hint: Ironically, the award goes to a non-American.) Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Ryen Russillo Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Head into the Ringiverse to stay up to date with all things superheroes and nerd culture entertainment. Hosted by a rotating lineup of superfans at The Ringer, including Mallory Rubin and Van Lathen, shows will provide instant reactions to blockbuster releases, insightful backstories on canon, and mind-bending theories, as well as fresh takes on the latest news and rumors. Check out the Ringerverse on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Today's episode is about sports. Yes, finally an episode about sports on this. Ringer Podcast Network podcast. If you don't like sports, we'll be back next week to talk about

something that is in sports. But if you do like sports, and if debating sports statistics gives you a special thrill, you are going to love this episode. So the best way to explain what this pod is really about is to probably just tell you the simple story of how it came to be. When I was a kid, I was obsessed with sports statistics. I remember when I was eight or nine years old, I went to a summer baseball camp in McLean, Virginia. And most of the kids were like, you know, normal kids who go to a baseball camp to learn how to play baseball. That's a normal thing to do. I was not normal. My idea of a good time at baseball camp was sitting in the dugout fielding questions from the coaches about statistics in baseball history. They'd be like, Derek, who has the most strikeouts

in a single season in MLB history? Who has the most strikeouts in their career? Who has the most walks in their career? And I would say the answer to those questions, are. are Nolan Ryan, Nolan Ryan, and Nolan Ryan. So a couple weeks ago, I revisit, I suppose, the ethos of my eight or nine-year-old self, and I tweet out to my followers, what do you think is the most interesting, most impressive sports statistic in American history?

And I got thousands, literally thousands of responses. And I'm going through them and I'm thinking, this is so fun. I should write an article about this. But in order to do that, in order to really be sort of quantitative about it, I realized I had to come up with a rule, a rule, a benchmark, to compare the awesomeness of statistics, the impressiveness of statistics across sports.

And the rule that I came up with is what I call the 50% test. That is, what sports records are at least 50% greater than the relevant second place accomplishment. That might sound a little confusing, but a quick example, I think, will make it clear. Take Wilt Chamberlain. Wilt Chamberlain, 100-point game in 1962, that is legendary. But Kobe Bryant, in 2006, scored 81 points, which means it would take 121 points in a game to pass the 50% test in this category. So Chamberlain doesn't make it into the club on that statistic. But I would argue that his greatest feat is not just one game, it is rather that Wilt scored 60 points

on 32 separate occasions. He scored 60 points more times than every other basketball player in NBA history combined. Now that makes you a card-carrying member of the 50% Club. So I write this article, the 50% Club,

the most impressive sports statistics in basketball and baseball and football and individual sports, and I tell my producer for this show, Devin, about it. And she says, oh, we got to have a podcast about this. Like, let's grab one of the sports potters from the ringer network, and they can debate this stuff with you. So I am thrilled to tell you that we got one of my favorite podcasters in the world,

and that man is Ryan Rusillo. Ryan hosts the Ryan Rusillo podcast. And I don't have much more to say about this episode, except I had a blast debating all of these stats from all. all of these sports with Ryan for an hour this week. And if you were anything like me, if you love sports statistics, and if you find yourself browsing football reference

and basketball reference at odd hours of the day, my friend, this episode is for you. I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. Ron Russela, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me, man. fired up for this. Me too.

It is really awesome to meet you. I have been listening to you for years. When Bill Simmons, brief story actually, before we get started, When Bill Simmons first called me to talk about doing a podcast for The Ringer, he was like, so what kind of a pod do you want to do? How do you see the organization of each episode? I was like, well, of course, I would want it to be an interview podcast like you do, Bill.

But honestly, the one thing that I'm sure I want to do is that Ryan Lucillo has these cold opens that I love, that he keeps it in his voice and then opens up a bit for other perspectives. And I just love the way that you have just mastered the art of the cold open. and I am doing my best week to week to emulate. So I just wanted to kick it off by embarrassing you on the record. I thought about giving you the compliment before we pressed record, but I think it's more appropriate for me to give it to you on the record. Well, it probably took me about 17 years to nail it.

So good luck. I've been doing it for about 17 weeks. It's not easy. It took me way too long, you know, because I treat now the open of the podcast like the open of a radio show. and I've said many times, which gets some pushback from writers and anchors, that the hardest thing to do is radio,

and 10 times harder than that is solo radio. So I had kind of jumped around a little solo radio, not so much, and unless you're really consistently doing it every day for a couple of years, it's hard to figure out exactly what your voice is and how you want to close your monologues and all that kind of stuff. So now that you have a little bit more freedom and you can tweak things a little bit,

I feel good about it now, So I appreciate you saying that, but it definitely, it shouldn't take you as long. It took me way too long. Well, I'm doing my best. It's good to have your guidance. So you, Ryan, you're here to help me complete a side project that I've been working on for the last few weeks, which is to figure out the most impressive sports statistic in American history. And just before we got on, I thought I should probably define impressive, both for you and for me and probably for the audience.

I'm thinking of impressive as having two definitions or two components. number one, the hardest to replicate sports statistic in U.S. history. And number two, the most important, because some things are really hard to replicate, but they're not actually that important. And so I'm trying to find the intersection of difficult to replicate and really significant. So I built out this huge list of U.S. sports accomplishments that surpass a totally arbitrary random threshold that I made up. And that is my 50% test.

That is, if the accomplishment is at least 50% greater than the next. next person in that relevant category, then congratulations, you are in the 50% club. And so I published this long list for the Atlantic of the 50% club members, includes Will Chamberlain, Nolan Ryan, Wayne Gretzky. And I thought, what the hell? Let's winnow these down and try to figure out the most impressive sports statistic in each sport and then hopefully of all time. And who better to help me with that than Mr. Cold Open himself. So are you ready to do this? Yeah, I'm ready. I can't wait to know what, you know, like, I'm fired up to know what you're going to throw out there. And then, because I put down a couple on my own where I was like, is this worthy of it?

Is it mean too much to me? Because some of these historically, like, I can't wait to get into it because some of them you just have to rule out as impossible. Like these things will not happen again. So it's almost like they're not worth talking about because they're just not approachable. But go ahead. You're right. Some of these, as we're going to talk about, are they stand the test of time.

And others of them are punished by the test of time because they're such products of their era. Like, we're going to talk about like Sy Young in a second. Say Young has like a thousand complete games. It would take like a modern pitcher about 300 years to do that. And in a way, that's, it's incredible that he did it. But they're basically using pitchers like thoroughbred horses in the, you know, early 1900s. And so it's not, no one's ever going to do that again. And it's partially because the sport was so different. So, all right, here's how we're going to do this. We're going to go sport by sport, football, basketball, baseball, individual. I am going to give you, Ryan, a list of nominees for the most

impressive sadistic, and you're going to help me figure out the number one stat in each sport. So I thought, let's start with football, coming off the Super Bowl. Plus, I think, is probably the easiest category because there really are only two, I think, meaningful 50% club members, and those are Jerry Rice and Tom Brady. I tried to find more. I looked at sacks, interceptions, career rushing stats. In all those categories, you've got a bunch of athletes that are clustered toward the top. Rice and Brady really stand out.

So first, Jerry Rice. The 50% club stat is that he has 2,245 career receiving yards in the playoffs. That is 50% more than any other player. Probably my favorite Jerry Rice stat, receiving yards after 40, after turning 40 years old. There's only three players in NFL history that have caught a pass after turning 40. Brett Farve did it for negative two yards. Tom Brady did it for six yards. Jerry Rice has 2,5009 yards after turning 40.

Also holds a triple crown for receivers, for career numbers. Incredible, obviously, the greatest receiver of all time. Then he got Tom Brady, the goat, we can rush through this. The key 50% club stat is that basically if it's a Tom Brady playoff stat, it's in the 50% club, playoff wins, playoff touchdowns, Super Bowl wins, no other quarterback has five. He has seven. Biggest Super Bowl comeback of all time. It was 10 points, and then Tom Brady came back from 20 points down against the Falcons.

So Jerry Rice, Tom Brady, how do you determine the number one statistic in NFL history? The playoff stuff is really unfair, you know, because it's, you look at this accomplishment and you go, okay, this is insane. Like Brady played in 47 playoff games, which is more than 22 franchises have. So every single playoff number he's going to own, all the right stuff I went through last night, too. And you go, okay, is it a bit like, you know, Bernie Williams has all these postseason records that is completely different because the postseason in baseball has changed so many different times. So, like, congrats to Bernie Williams, you had a million more opportunities. So I looked up the

rushing stuff too, man, and, you know, Emmett Smith's at 18,355 yards. And I thought, okay, well, the way the game is played, do we look at that as an unapproachable record? And it may be the case. I mean, Mark Ingram's the leading active guy at number 54 all time at 7,000, almost 8,000 yards. Emmett also beat Walter in like 36 more games. But there's still, that's not like outer space. It may be a different style of football. Running backs just aren't used.

They're not getting the same number of carries. But it's not impossible. So I wouldn't put it impossible. I think the Jerry Rice stuff is stupid. So I would actually probably lean Rice more than Brady because if we just went some of the more traditional career statistics, as great as Brady's are. Rice is still, I think what?

He's number one in reception yards at 22,895. He's 5,400 yards ahead of number two. And so sure, we pass a lot more and all this stuff. But the gap between Rice and the number two guy on some of these numbers that aren't just playoff influenced would have me give Rice the award here because Brady's regular season stuff as great as it is, isn't as dominant to the number two quarterbacker won't be moving forward, even with his longevity as the playoff stuff is. Because as great as the playoff numbers, I think you understand the point.

It's like, nobody else actually, like, it's great. You're in those because you're great, but no one else has had the opportunity to accumulate that many numbers. Yeah, his opportunities are also partly a product of the fact that he had, arguably, the best coach of all time. And so it's difficult to disentangle exactly how much responsibility there is there. Whereas with Jerry Rice, it's funny, I was prepared to debate you on this. had Rice going in for the number one stat of all time in the NFL. I thought you were going to say

Tom Brady. I do want to point this out. My favorite Tom Brady stat, and this came from a Boston Sports Radio host, Alex Barth. This is ridiculous. The NFL record for career completions is 67.8%. Tom Brady has made the conference championship 73.7% of the seasons he's been the primary starter. So Brady makes the conference championship at a higher rate than any quarterback has ever completed passes. That is stupid. That is just insane. It's an amazing statistic, but I think at the end of the day, for most impressive individual stat, I think the gap that Jerry Rice has on career receptions, career yards, career touchdowns, and then all of the playoff stats on top of that, I think he probably is the statistical goat, even if he isn't the overall goat. Yeah, it's just, it's a monumental gap every

time you look at Rice and the next guy. The receptions is a little closer, but receiving touchdowns, he's at 197. Randy Moss is number two at 156. T.O., who had an amazing career, is at 153. I mean, we're talking about almost 50 more touchdowns than the guys behind him. And I don't, you know, that's like there are gaps. I mean, it's kind of the Gretzky stuff that we're teeing up here. You start looking at the gap between the top guy and the number two. I went ahead with him. We're going to do the Brady Conference Championship percentage thing though, too. And the weird thing that's happened with NFL history is that it's been

because they rebranded in the merger and the Super Bowl, a lot of the guys before that don't get enough love. And for Otto Graham to make 10 straight championship games, 10 straight seasons, he made the championship game because they're not labeled the Super Bowls, you know, for a very obvious reason,

he gets completely overlooked historically. And we just look at the forward pass back then and go, like, what the hell is this? You know, it's kind of like the Bob Coosie stuff that happens to him. We were like, I get it. Bob Coosie would have a hard time staying in front of Kyrie Erie. But, you know, it was 1950 when he started, so layoff. Yeah, all right, cool. We're moving Jerry Wrights to the finals. We're going to come back to him in just a second. I'm going to move on a basketball. So in this category, there were so many

different statistics that I picked on. I'm sure you've got your own. I try to narrow it down to a top four, and that meant cutting some of my favorite players. So number one that I had to cut. LeBron James, maybe my favorite player in the NBA, but I couldn't really find a meaningful statistic where he's in the 50% club, and I didn't want to do this complicated bespoke statistic where I'm like, the most games with 27 and 7 after turning 35 while Mercury's in retrograde. Like, you can do it if you find enough little things, but it's just too complicated. Another last second elimination that's never going to win the category, but this is just a fun as hell statistic that I was really happy to have unearthed. Nicole Yokic, won MVP after being the four,

41st pick in the NBA draft. No other league MVP was ever drafted lower than 15th. So no league MVP has ever been drafted in the 20s, ever been drafted in the 30s, and Nicole Yokic very well might win consecutive MVPs as the 45th pick. I think those are great.

But my top four, for greatest all-time, most impressive NBA statistics are the following three. Number one, Curry's three-point dominance. Steph Curry, 22 career games with tet or more three-pointers. no other player in the NBA has more than five. Number two, Will Chamberlain, 100-point game is iconic.

Kobe got pretty close with 81. But his most standalone statistic is that Wilt scored 60 points on 32 separate occasions. And that is more than every other basketball player in NBA history combined. 60 points on 32 separate occasions. Number three, Bill Russell, eight straight championships, 1959 to 1966,

only three basketball teams. Minneapolis Lakers, Chicago Bulls, Los Angeles Lakers, only those three have ever won three consecutive championships. No one's won four. Bill Russell won eight straight. And finally, I don't know exactly how to fit this in in my 50% club, but Michael Jordan is 6 in the finals. That might be 50% club membership and by some token,

but there's a kind of perfection to that statistic that almost no other stat in sports history has. So I had to put 6 and 0 in my final four here. So my NBA Final 4, again, Curry, Will, Bill Russell, Jordan. Do you have others you want to throw into the category? And what's your pick in this category? You know, I don't, actually. I think you pretty much nailed that.

I think the assist thing would be the one where people look at Stockton being 3,000 ahead of Jason Kidd, who's number two. Chris Paul, as great as his career's been, he's still 5,000 behind Stockton. so I do think that that's one that kind of jumps out. It's just nobody pays enough attention to it. Stockton also leads steals by about 600 on Jason Kidd, 700 on Michael Jordan, so he's at 3,200. So there's some Stockton numbers that are in there that are crazy. And again, it's longevity and playing every single game

and being the primary ball handler, throwing it to the number two score of all time where the Malone Stockton stats are incredible because of what they were with each other. So the Curry part of it, I'm the biggest deaf fan ever, but it still feels so new. And I'm not saying anything as necessarily going to surpass him. He's the best shooter I've ever seen. He's the best shooter in the history of the game.

I don't really think it's even debatable. There could be some version of a guy who comes along that takes a million threes and maybe puts up, you know, something that's at least to scale of I don't, you know, it sounds ridiculous to say it out loud. But it's still, this part of the game is still so new. I don't know. I wouldn't rule that part of it out. if the Russell championship is eight straight, does that kind of cancel out Jordans? I mean, that sounds blasphemous, right?

I'm just throwing that back to you. Yeah, no, this is something I didn't include Jordan in my original article, and I got screamed at left and right. Like, I didn't include him precisely because of the Russell stat. Russell did lose in the finals, right? He lost to St. Louis. Yeah. So he doesn't have a perfect record.

And so you could argue that the perfection of Jordan's is its own special category that might shine brighter than Russell's. But Jordan wasn't even in my original article. So in my original article, just going off of that, it basically comes down to do you like Wilt's individual statistics or do you like Russell's team statistics? And this gets back, Ryan, to what you were saying earlier about the NFL stats, that some of these statistics are more dependent on opportunity outside of individual contribution, more different. more dependent on opportunity than others. So it's really about whether you want to go here, I suppose, with individual dominance or just out-of-control team dominance. You also have to have an understanding of whether you want to go back to the history archives

and watch some of these games and understand how different it was, because I think it's fair to be deferential towards these previous eras and that this is how the game was played, and these are the guys that played in it. and you just just a broad brush, wipe them all out because they're not as athletic as guys playing today. That's unfair.

I always joked that I think Eddie House, if you played in the 50s, there'd be statues of Eddie House outside of elementary high school basketball. Like, if you just time traveled, Eddie House, you just wouldn't even know what to do with the guy. They also, Jerry West has always pointed this out.

He goes, you guys can carry the basketball today. He goes, we had to stay on top of the basketball with the way we dribbled. There wasn't this gather stuff. I mean, we've invented a new. way to travel on some of these step back like gathers to the side on three point shots. So even though everybody's more athletic and all these different things, there's one thing that kind of stands out of the big numbers, though, the rebounding numbers are ridiculous because

of the way they bring the ball up and they'd shoot immediately. And guys weren't as good at shooting. Shot selection was not as strict. They just got out and ran. They got out and ran and they put up shots all over the place. So you'll look back at some of these great NBA players and then you start looking at the shooting percentage. You go, what the hell happened here?

which is why Wilts almost 24,000 rebounds is number one. Look at some of the rebounding numbers these guys had. For Wilts' career, he averaged 23 a game. Bill Russell's number two at 21,000 plus. I mean, we're talking about some of these guys in a playoff game having 40 rebounds. So, yes, they were awesome. And I want to be respectful. But I also want to point out that some of this rebounding stuff that you'll see is just never going to happen again.

It just go back and look at the shot attempts by season. Will also was taken, I think, 11 plus free throws a game on top of all of this. So when I look at some of the wilt stuff, there's two that jump out. It's the 100 point game and it's averaging 50.4 points per game in a season over a full season. That was this whole season. So yes, the game was different. Yes, they got more shots up. I think that impacts the rebounding stuff.

And you could say, well, Willt today wouldn't get. Okay, fine. but you could still attempt to get 100 points in the game today, and only one guy got to 80% of it. There's a great Brian Winhorst article in ESPN from earlier this year where he was essentially celebrating the historical absurdness of Chamberlain's 1961-1962 season. Let me just read you from that article.

Quote, Chamberlain averaged 50.4 points per game. That's the highest ever, and no one is close. Michael Jordan is the only other player besides Chamberlain to average more than 37. Chamberlain averaged 39.5 shots per game, the highest ever, and no one is close. No one else has averaged more than 30. Another mark to stand forever is his 48.5 minutes per game average. He was never substituted out that season. He only missed eight minutes of one game after he was ejected in the fourth quarter.

he averaged 48 minutes because more than 48 minutes because he played seven overtime games. End quote. It's just ridiculous. And to me, the only thing that keeps Chamberlain's 1962 season from sheer immortality is that his team didn't win the finals because, again, he lost to Russell. So again, we find these two statistical champions clashing against each other. And yes, it was 60 years ago, but still, I feel like as long as we're isolating, not the greatest athletes of all time. Not the greatest basketball players necessarily, but the most impressive sports statistic, it has to come down to either Chamberlain's 1961, 62 season, or Russell's eight straight championships.

Well, you're kind of asking me, like, what's harder to do? 11 championships and 13 seasons or 50 a game or 101 game. And I would just go, if I had gunned to my head, I'd just say pull a trigger. Like there's no, there's no right answer. And both answers also, you know, seem impossible to argue against or argue for in the face of facing one of these other ones. When it comes down to Russell and Will, I mean, there's a whole other path we can go down where Russell clearly was wired the right way.

And Will throughout his entire career had people questioning what his deal was. And, you know, some of those later Lakers years, you can read some of the stories where it's just kind of reminds you, you know, as much. things has changed. I'll go back and read stuff and it's hilarious how much the way the coverage is in the 1960s. Hell, it goes back to Ted Williams and Babe Ruth and I'd read people with like early hot takes, columnist being like, you're never going to win them with this guy. It's like 1924. It's crazy. So we actually kind of are very repetitive when it comes to stuff. I mean, the same thing is done in any political history. So I don't want to compare, I don't want to do this under the idea that, okay, we're comparing the two guys.

It's just the two accomplishments. And I don't look, no one, no one's going to tell me that 11 and 13, is possible, but it still feels more possible than 100 points in a game. Yeah. If you're going to move one wilt stat to the finals of this exercise, what is the statistic that you want to move to the finals? Is it the 100 point game? It's probably 50 a game. Okay.

All right. What do you think? I mean, you want to push back on that? Because like I said, when we're doing this, we're trying to put together the number one seeds and it's only one per sport, there's going to be one left off. that it feels ridiculous leaving it off. But maybe it's just the math in my head where I go, I think 50.4 a game over a full season is still harder than 100.

I think it is too. Look, I'm going to get screamed at no matter what I bumped to the finals. Like people have incredible emotional attachments to the statistic that represents, you know, their favorite moment of sports, their childhood, their favorite time, like researching sports statistics if you were that kind of nerd. To me, I made this commitment to the 50% test because I, thought it was a great benchmark to compare athletic accomplishments across sports. And the number that passes that or gets closer to passing that for Wilt, it is averaging 50.4 points per game.

When the highest since then is Michael Jordan going out of his mind in the late 1980s, scoring 37 points per game. 37 isn't anywhere close to 50. I feel pretty good putting Wilt's 50 points per game in the finals. All right, we're going to move on to baseball. Before we get to my final four, some last second eliminations that I had to make. I eliminated Ricky Henderson's stolen base record. It's awesome, but I'm just not going to end up saying that Ricky Henderson has the best statistic in baseball history. You've got a bunch of stuff.

That sounds very anti-Ricky Hendon. It's not anti-Ricky Henderson. I love him. He's great. He's great. You're not going to be the number one here. It's going to be someone who hit a lot of home runs or struck out a lot of people. That's a bit of foreshadowing.

Do you want to make a quick pitch for Ricky Henderson, just running the whole damn thing right now? because we could do it. The stolen base stuff is out of control. No, he's at 1,406 stolen bases. He's 468 ahead of number two. So that's what I was always looking for. I was looking for what's a normal, consumable stat that we still think is,

because we could get really weird. Like I looked up Bond's intentional walk record. He was walked on. Oh, we're getting there. All right. Oh, no, no. Hold Bond's intentional walks. We're going to get very weird with Bond's intentional walks.

funny thing at Ricky Henderson before we end the Ricky Henderson segment. He set the single season record for Stolen Bases when he was 23. And then he played another 22 years and set the record and led the leagues again in stolen bases at the age of 39. He led the league in stolen bases at the age of 39. That is just absolutely insane. Anyway, we are not putting Ricky Henderson into the finals of this category. We talked about the Cy Young stuff.

511 career wins in 749 complete games. That is amazing. It's hilarious. It's from an era of baseball that does not resemble this era of baseball at all. When pitchers were being used, like essentially indentured servants, they would throw nine innings, go home, drink four whiskeys, ice the arm, come back the next day, throw another nine innings. Very impressive. It's just nothing like that's going to happen again.

Two really emotional records that I didn't put into my top four, but Ryan, if you want to bump them in, I would probably allow it. You've got Ripkin's 26-132 consecutive games, and you've got Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hit streak. They're both iconic. They're both potentially unbreakable, but there are other people who got close in each category. Obviously, Ripkin edged out Lou Gehrig.

As for DiMaggio's 56, Pete Rose has a 44-game hit streak. That's a little closer than some of the other records we're about to touch on. So young Ripkin, DiMaggio, are any of those records to you, in the pantheon enough that you really want to continue to consider them for for best in baseball history. The wins thing is you're right. We were sitting here talking about basketball and how different it is and how it's evolved and the shot taking and making has changed. The pitching stuff is just dumb. Like I go back, I used to go back and look at that stuff all the time.

It doesn't even matter. I mean, Cy Young's got 511 and the next guy's in the 400s and no one else is above 400. I looked up the active numbers. Verlander has 226 wins because he has a contract going in the next. year. That puts them at 70. Nobody's going to win 300 games again. No, that's right. I mean, 511 is a foreign language. The Ripkin number, no one wants to break that record ever again. No modern athlete will go, you know what I want to do is playing every game. So that one is disqualified because no one actually wants to break

it. I will say something really dumb about DiMaggio Street. I don't know how my brain works when normally it is the math part of the argument. And I've seen different presentations proving how ridiculous this streak is and how impossible it is. I just can't believe there haven't been more people that have taken a swing of this thing, that have challenged it. I don't know why I feel that way because I know how hard it actually is. I mean, Tony Gwynn, I looked it up, 25-game hit streak.

That's his longest. Tony Gwyn, maybe the best command in the batters box. But no one's going to touch this one. It's been 80 years. And what are we got? We got Willie Keeler, 45 games, Pete Rose 44. I remember Jimmy Rollins had one over the scope of two seasons in 05 and 06 at 38 games. I remember being a kid and, you know, turning on Paul Molitor highlights being like,

oh, my God, he got another hit. I just could never believe that there wouldn't be somebody who just has an unbelievable command. But now the game has changed so much that nobody's really changing their approach with two strikes. And that's what all these guys did. So this thing's actually more untouchable now with all the emphasis on loft and everything else that we see. I mean, two strike, the approach is not different at all, which I think is still kind of ridiculous at times. And also is why we have so many pitchers putting up insane numbers because guys just didn't even care about making contact with two strikes. They don't want to change their approach.

So I have a hard time eliminating it because it has been 80 years, despite everything that I just said. You know, Ty Cobb at 366, that batting average. I don't think anybody's ever going to touch that again. So now I'm really curious as to how what you got to. so I'm not making an argument for it until I know what the rest of your options were. Yeah. No. So, I mean, one side I heard from a lot of Boston fans when I made a big deal about Joe DiMaggio's hit streak is that, and I check this out,

Ted Williams had a higher batting average over those 56 games than Joe DiMaggio during the 56 game hit streak, which is kind of just an incredible accomplishment within an accomplishment. All right. So here. I mean, you could, you'd argue that means he was more. productive, and don't even get me started about comparing Joe DiMaggio to Ted Williams, because honestly, if you go back and look at all this stuff, it's not close. But it's still 56 in a row. That's right. You know, so what are you going to do? Yeah. And that gets to, that gets to another

thing about statistics, which is that at the end of the day, when we choose our number one, some of these are quirky and some of them are important, right? Like getting one single 56 games in a row and batting, you know, 250 over that 56 game stretch. Was that what it was? It wasn't. It wasn't exactly Yeah, I just want to make sure. For example, for example, that is quirky, but not significant. Winning A straight championships, scoring 50 points a game, like that is a level of significance above quirkiness. Anyway, moving on, these are my four big baseball stats to close. Barry Bond's early 2000 stats, I don't want bonds to win the category, but here's a brief reminder of what he did after turning 36. In 2001, he broke the home run record. In 2002,

he led the league in batting average, on-base percentage, slugging percentage, and total bases. In 2003, he won MVP for the third straight year. And in 2004, people stopped pitching to him. The previous non-Bonds record for intentional walks was 45. That's William McCovey set in 1969. Bonds walked 120 times in one year. He basically tripled the intentional walk record in one year. So, bonds early 2000 numbers, yes, the clear, yes, the steroid. it's still so outlandish. Number two, and this is another tough thing because of the era of baseball, but you look at Babe Ruth's 1920s and the whole thing is just stupid.

Yes, he played 7,000 years ago. The stats are still insane. In two different years, he hit more home runs than any other team. He had six years with 135 RBIs and 135 walks. That's more than all other players in Major League history. Once you start, you can't stop. His entire 1920s is one, like, Mount Kilimanjaro over at, serengetti of other players. Number three, my favorite player when I was a kid, Nolan Ryan.

Ryan gets into the 50% club for his no-hitter record. He has seven. No one else has five. Andy Career Walks record hilariously. He has 52% more career walks than number two, Steve Carlton. But the entire career is just ridiculous. He tied or set the career record for years' play, total strikeouts, strikeouts in a year, wild pitches, no hitters, one-hitters, and two-hitters. Finally, Pedro Martinez in 2000. From a 50% club perspective, his ERA was 49% lower in the next lowest in baseball. That was Kevin Brown. I'm going to count that in the 50% club.

It's the highest adjusted ERA ever in the middle of the steroid era. I'm a Yankees fan. I grew up in the 1990s, it's a huge Yankees fan. Pedro Martinez in the year 2000 is probably my vote for the most impressive sports accomplishment, baseball accomplishment of my lifetime. So there's my top four, Bonds, Ruth, Ryan, Pedro. Who else you got? I can't believe we're this on the same page about Pedro. I didn't know that you were a Pedro guy. I'm not a Pedro guy. I'm a Derek Jeter guy. I got into baseball in 1996 when there was a

rookie for the New York Yankees named Derek. So I hated Pedro, but hate forces you to pay attention to someone. And I was paying very close attention in 99, 2000. And he was just on another planet. And he was doing something that made no sense at the time. So that Pedro 2000, he had a 174 ERA, the second highest or second, I should say, second best ERA in the American League. So forget the Kevin Brown part of it. In the American League, the next best ERA was Roger Clemens at 3.7. So he was almost two full runs better than the next guy at the peak of the steroid era.

The league average ERA was over five. And opponents hit 167 against Pedro. that year, which depending on what you look at, some sortables, it's either the lowest ever in the hit. So think about this. Pedro, at the peak of the steroid era has arguably the lowest opponent's batting average against. There's this other reliever that I think only pitched 20 innings that technically qualifies who is slightly ahead of him in the opponents, you know, and then I think there's a whip number in there too. So you're right. His adjusted ERA stuff is so off the charts that I always bring it up. He's the best picture I've ever seen. I don't want to hear about

anybody else. I just I just don't. I watched it every single time. My schedule was around Pedro's schedule because I was, you know, it was a big Red Sox fan back then. The number of things that I would turn down for a chance of Pedro tickets, you know, guys in town, I'd be like, no, you're in Pedro's pitching today. Like, are you kidding me? That's what it was. And I know as a Yankees fan, you're probably like, well, it wasn't all that intimidating. And it's very funny, though, because if you think of Pedro, the Yankees figured him out better because they faced him so many times. It was the same thing. We're Verif on the Red Sox side of it. Like when you keep getting to see, like they weren't at superhero levels against each other the way you would think of.

So for the regular season and these seasons around it, I just don't know if anyone cares about it just a DRA enough to even put this in there. That's why I'm shocked you did. I was going to bring it up thinking there was no chance it was going to be entered into this. To me, it's more impressive than the Nolan Ryan thing. But again, that's kind of the whole in Pedro's game is that it's not longevity. So if we're going that one season, I'd love to keep it in. I'd probably replace Nolan Ryan with the DiMaggio streak. And the bonds part of it, the funny thing is with his attentional walks,

they kept walking him after he was done. He wasn't even a threat as much anymore. And the rest of the league still hadn't figured out that maybe you can pitch to this guy a little bit more here. And it's funny that you don't want to touch any of the home run stuff. I'm going to go ahead and say Pedro, but I'm totally biased. I am totally biased. but lining up what he did in that year

where nobody could get anybody out and he was in the one-sevenths, I just don't know if people will care about it. I think you get a lot of pushback from this. Yeah, there's a part of me that wants to give this award to Babe Ruth because Babe Ruth, it's not just that the statistics are remarkable.

It's also that the statistics are important in a way that a lot of the other stats we're talking about aren't, because his dominance pulled the game, right? It was like, it was the Steph Curry effect on steroids. He pulled the game toward an evolution that even with that evolution, no one's actually defeated or overcome some of the stuff he has. I mean, we could go into like, you know, OPS plus, on base plus slugging percentage adjusted for a competition and stadium.

He has all sorts of records there, but he did stuff that changed the game and dominant at the same time. So there's a part of me that wants to give it to Babe Ruth, but it's really hard to get over what you've already pointed out in just a few minutes ago, this sort of anti-recency bias,

that the game has changed so much in basketball and baseball that it does this little bit of a disservice to award people for a game that's 100 years old. And for that, that, I feel fine giving it to Pedro Martinez. I think it's the most statistically unusual and impressive accomplishment of my lifetime in baseball. I think it's that special.

And I hate the guy as the Yankees fan. So I wouldn't push back on Ruth, though. I just didn't know what the one specifically you were. Because if you're saying a cumulative thing here, we're talking about somebody who completely changed the game, in a way very few people have ever done in their sport. And if you go from 1921 on when he passes Roger Connor for career home runs, he leads baseball in home runs from 21 to 73 until Aaron passes him. Just to like the dominance that he kept adding to his own record that in 21, he's already the all-time career home run leader at 162. And it goes basically another five decades. So if you want to give me, if you want to give me, If it's an overall thing, importance and all that kind of stuff, it's hard to take Pedro's 2000 and say,

okay, you know, it's what made Ruth was from a, from a bigger picture. It's technically back to looking at it. So I don't know what the ruling here is. Again, I defer to you. It's your podcast. So if you want to go Ruth, I'm not going to push back on it. All right. I've thought about this a bit.

This is not just about most impressive accomplishment. It's about most impressive statistics. So even though I am going to give Pedro the more impressive accomplishment, the statistic that I think speaks loudest from this list is Babe Ruth hitting more home runs than any other team in two different years. I think that captures the outlandishness of the accomplishment and predicts everything that you just said. Of course, the player who hit more home runs than every other team is going to, in a matter of years, break the all-time record for home runs and set it for decades to come. So I think for me, that's the statistic that I'm going to bump into the finals.

All right, we have one more category before we get to the finals of all finals, which is individual sports. A couple necessary last minute exclusions. Serena Williams, Nadal, incredible, the go-to-the-respective sports. I just don't, you look at the records, and they don't, they're not exceeding someone like Steffi Graf or obviously Jokovic Federer by the kind of margins that a lot of these other stats are. That leaves some Olympics records and also a golf record. So Simone Biles, 19 world championship gold medals, the most decorated gymnast in history. That's one entry. Michael Phelps, 23 gold medals.

Nobody else has 10. And then Tiger Woods. It's a little bit complicated to find golf statistics that pass the kind of threshold that I'm setting up. But this is just a wild accomplishment. From 1997 to 2013, Tagger was a combined. 126 under par in major championships. Number two was Steve Flesh finishing 251 strokes behind him at 125 over par. Finn Mecholson was third at 128 over par.

So that's completely insane. Also, he's the only player, this is Tiger, in modern history, to win all four major awards in a row, and the only player to win any major by 10 or more strokes. And he did that twice in the 97 Masters and the 2000 U.S. Open. So to me, this category is really about, Simone Biles, the World Championship gold medals are obviously impressive, but to me this is really about Michael Phelps

more than doubling the total number of Olympic gold medals or Tiger Woods just dominating in the late 90s and early 2000s. So do you have other entrance into the individual category and how would you shake it out between Tiger and Phelps? I know for me it's easier to consume the Tiger number because the way you just laid it out, you're like, wait, everybody's over,

and he's that many under? Like, what else are we talking about? Now, sometimes I'll see what the Serena Williams argument, like they'll argue, okay, well, she has this many championships and Jordan only has six. I'll be like, okay, but if Jordan had a chance to win four rings every year, he would have more than six, and that's what we're talking about with the slams and tennis,

and it's the same thing with medals. Some people are going to have a higher medal count because their discipline has so many more opportunities to medal. So as absurd as the Biles numbers are and Phelps on top of it, it's harder for me to put that in the context because they're in a sport what allows you to do far more. There's just way more opportunities to go ahead and metal, even if you're the all-time medal leader to begin with. And I feel the same way about Nadal and Federer and Jokovic at some point. Like you just, if you had four NBA championships every year, Jordan would have more than six. I don't know why this is that hard.

but I think sometimes people just try to be different about it. Although Serena's longevity, hers is absolutely ridiculous for as long as she's gone in a sport that isn't very forgiving. So I would go with Tiger because there's nothing else to compare it to. I mean, I actually didn't know that number how far away everybody else was from him. So I would submit that one. Yeah, I'm with you on that. I'm going to go Tiger as well. the Michael Phelps stuff is extraordinary.

The thing about Tiger is that the amount of competition that exists within golf right now is just extraordinary. And with some of these Olympic sports, you get specialization that sometimes can winnow the competition. But Tigers out there doing something that thousands and thousands, millions of people around the world are trying to be the best at and dominating at a level that's unlike anything we've seen in this sport. So I think Tigers 97 to 2013 numbers are going to be my ticket to the finals. I do want to call out. This is not 50% club worthy, but it's going to be an amazing Disney movie one day. Bob Beeman's long jump in the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City.

Did you come across this in your research? Yeah, I knew all about it because we used to, I actually ran track in high school. So people would go, do you know about this? And it was always kind of cool the first time somebody would learn about Beeman, especially as we've seen like everyone, athletes have evolved. We're faster. you know, doing bigger things. I shouldn't say,

wait, Jesus. Maybe I mean it's the human race. But every time I see somebody learn about the beam and jump for the first time, it's like, wait, what? And it was like a guy was just, he was like a superhero for the first, you know what I mean? So go ahead.

Yeah, let me unpack for people who haven't heard it. So 1968 Summer Olympics, Mexico City, this is a period where new long jump records are typically set or exceeded by maybe one inch, a half an inch every year. So Bob Beamen enters the 1968 Summer Olympics, and the all-time record is 27.5 feet for the long jump. He didn't beat that existing record by one inch, two inches, three inches would be quite a bit. He beat it by 22 inches. The 22 inches, two feet, basically. The jump was so long that it was famously beyond the measuring equipment that

was available to the Olympic judges, and they had to pause the competition for several minutes to figure out what just happened. And he was so shocked that when he learned that he had broken the record by almost two feet, he collapsed and experienced what doctors later described as a catapalytic seizure. He did recover. And the jump itself is, I believe, still an Olympic record, but not an official world record, but breaking a record like this by essentially 11 times the amount you would expect the record to be broken. It's just a fun. A fun. fun one-off. All right, let me jump us to the finals and remind you and myself and listeners where we are up to now. Okay, so we went NFL first and decided that the winner for NFL

statistics would be Jerry Rice and his career numbers. Then we went to the NBA and we awarded a tie between Russell's eight consecutive championships and Wilts 50.4 points per game average in the 1961, 1962 season. Then we went into baseball, and at the last minute, I rested the award away from Pedro Martinez and gave it to Babe Ruth, exceeding the home run totals of every other team. And finally, in the individual sports category, we gave it to Tegger Woods for basically smashing everyone else between 1997 and 2013 in major championships. In addition to those, one, two, three, four, we're going to add a statistic that I bumped

to the finals that got a... buy in whatever tournament style organization this is. And that is Wayne Gretzky's all-time assists numbers. Wayne Gretzky is the NHL all-time leader in goals. He is the all-time leader in assists. He is therefore the all-time leader in points, which are awarded for both. But the crazy mind-bending thing is that Gretzky finished with so many assists that even if he never scored a goal in his entire NHL career, he would still be the NHL's all-time leader in points. That is insane when I learned it. Maybe that's just something that all hockey fans know top of mind, but I did not realize that, and that completely blew my mind. So Gretzky is

in with a bullet to the finals. Ryan, how do you parse this final esteemed category of American sports records. It's Gretzky. So I went into it trying to figure out a way that it wouldn't be Gretzky, and when I did it all over again, I landed on Gretzzi again. So the thing I look at is this. He's at 2,857 career points. You made the great point about taking out all the goals.

He's still ahead of Yager. So Yager's at 1,921 points. So if you do some really basic math here, we're talking maybe 67% of Wayne's accomplishment. Kareem Abdul-Jubar is the all-time leading score. LeBron's going to pass him here in a couple years. Kareem has 38,000 plus points. Carl Malone was second at almost 37,000. So if we looked at the Wayne Gretzky gap to Yager and overall points and apply that percentage to Malone and Kareem, it would basically be like taking 11,000 points away from Carl Malone and yet he'd still be number two on the all-time scoring list. And to be fair, as we've talked about

with football and the style of play and some of the early baseball stuff and then also the basketball and the rebounding numbers. I'm sure some could argue, well, look, at the all-time goal seasons. You know, Wayne's got the most 92 and 81 and 82 season. You've got to dig here. A Vetchkin had 65, 14 years ago. Stamco's had 60, 10 years ago. Just guys scored more goals back then. But to say that as if we have to reexamine with a different lens of what Wayne did, that's so dismissive. I don't even like saying it as a caution to not say it. So I don't know how that one is taught because it's not Cy Young with 5-11. You know, and this isn't a, this isn't a century ago. We're not prepping for World War I. This is. Cars exist and they're being driven on the roads.

Yeah. And I remember, you know, I'm more of a kid of the 80s. And I remember, you know, our gym teacher, you know, we're arguing about the Red Sox Yankees and we're in gym class. And he goes, Do you guys have any idea what this Wayne Gretzky guy is doing? And we feel like, what does this mean? Because, you know, it's like Dale Murphy having 80 home runs. It's like Jim Rice having this many RBI in a game. Or, yeah, whatever. And so when you start putting it together that way, is impressive as all this stuff is?

I don't know that anyone has ever been as statistically dominant in a more modern era. You're right. I thought we might disagree. We did not confer before this, but you're right. And I think the reason we don't disagree is that I don't. don't know how a rational person looks at these statistics, and it comes to any other conclusion. What Wren Gretzky did is simply insane. Seth Wickersham from ESPN, when I tweeted out my initial request for all the greatest sports records in history, he shared this out with me, which I thought

was really fun. When Gretzky set the all-time single-season points record in 1986, he broke the previous record by 41%. To do that today, let's say in football, a quarterback would have to beat the record of 54 by 41%. That's throwing 76 touchdown passes in a year. That's Josh Allen throwing 76 touchdown passes to match what Gretzky did in one year. And then Gretzky's career excellence is really what propels him. You mentioned hitting home runs. A batter would have to hit more than 100 home runs to beat the current home run record

by 41%. These things aren't going to happen. And they're not going to happen because there's Wayne Gretzky and then there's everybody else. I'm with you. I think you said it perfectly, Derek, that you go, I don't know how a reasonable person looks at all this stuff. And yeah, we can hear about goalie pad size and, you know, different, you know, the lack of a trap zone by the, by the devils, you know, and all this different stuff. But it wasn't like, you know, he was, he was riding a horse here while he was playing. I still think it's modern enough to not be dismissive even if the era has changed.

I totally agree. I totally agree. I think it's Wayne. All right, you did it. You helped me work through the entire statistical corpus of American sports history, and it only took us 50 minutes. Ron Russelo, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure having you on the pod. Thanks. Plain English with Derek Thompson is produced by Devin Manzi. If you like what you hear, please follow, rate, and review us. New episode drops on Tuesday. Have a great weekend.