Major League Baseball Consecutive Games Played Streaks
Listed below are the 15 longest consecutive games played streaks in Major League Baseball history. To compile such a streak, a player must appear in every game played by his team. The streak is broken if the team completes a game in which the player neither takes a turn at bat nor plays a half-inning in the field.
The record of playing in 2,632 consecutive games over more than 16 years is held by Cal Ripken, Jr. of the Baltimore Orioles. Ripken surpassed Lou Gehrig of the New York Yankees, whose legendary record of 2,130 consecutive games had stood for 56 years. Before Gehrig, the record was held by Everett Scott, a shortstop with the Red Sox and Yankees whose streak ended in 1925, less than a month before Gehrig's began.
The record for a National League player is held by Steve Garvey of the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Diego Padres (1975–1983), though Garvey's 1,207-game streak is less than half the length of Ripken's. Previous holders of the National League record include Billy Williams of the Chicago Cubs (1963–1970), Stan Musial of the St. Louis Cardinals (1952–1957), and Gus Suhr of the Pittsburgh Pirates (1931–1937).
A notable recent streak was compiled by Miguel Tejada of the Oakland A's and Baltimore Orioles, who played in 1,152 consecutive games from 2000 to 2007. As of August 1, 2012, the current player with the longest active Major League consecutive games streak is Prince Fielder of the Detroit Tigers with 285, taking the record after Matt Kemp of the Los Angeles Dodgers was placed on the disabled list, ending his streak at 399 games.
Of the 15 people on this list, eight (Ripken, Gehrig, Williams, Sewell, Musial, Fox, Ashburn, and Banks) are members of the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Read more about Major League Baseball Consecutive Games Played Streaks: Key, List, Official Definition, Streak Starts, Continuations, and Ends, Consecutive Innings, Combined Japanese/U.S. Streak
Famous quotes containing the words major, league, baseball, games, played and/or streaks:
“As a novelist, I cannot occupy myself with “characters,” or at any rate central ones, who lack panache, in one or another sense, who would be incapable of a major action or a major passion, or who have not a touch of the ambiguity, the ultimate unaccountability, the enlarging mistiness of persons “in history.” History, as more austerely I now know it, is not romantic. But I am.”
—Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973)
“Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
“Forward the Light Brigade!”
—Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892)
“It is a mass language only in the same sense that its baseball slang is born of baseball players. That is, it is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be within the grasp of superficially educated people. It is not a natural growth, much as its proletarian writers would like to think so. But compared with it at its best, English has reached the Alexandrian stage of formalism and decay.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“Intelligence and war are games, perhaps the only meaningful games left. If any player becomes too proficient, the game is threatened with termination.”
—William Burroughs (b. 1914)
“They sat together halfway up a cliff
In a small niche let into it, the girl
Brightly, as if a star played on the place,
Paul darkly, like her shadow.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“The west yet glimmers with some streaks of day.
Now spurs the lated traveller apace
To gain the timely inn.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)