Another Major League Baseball season is approaching. In any given season, we might dream about some records falling and there are so many records and variations of records out there, we’ll absolutely see plenty of that.
Of course, with baseball being as old as it is and with the game having evolved in certain ways, there are some records on the books that won’t be touched. I’ll now attempt to run through some of the more mainstream records that will not be broken any time soon and I’m actually comfortable with saying they will never be broken.
Presenting a non-exhaustive list of some of baseball’s more fun unbreakable records.
Pitching stats, compiling version
There are some really obvious pitching records that will never, ever come close to even being threatened due to how the game has evolved over the years. Just look at these.
Single-season complete games: 75, Will White in 1879. The starting pitchers who are fortunate enough to avoid injury and be in a top spot in a rotation these days take 33 starts. Double that and complete every single start and we’re still pretty shy here. On that note…
Career complete games: 749, Cy Young. For some context, Gerrit Cole is 34 years old and has been in a rotation since he was 22. He’s made 317 career starts. He has eight complete games.
Single-season wins: 60, Old Hoss Radbourn in 1884. Again, full-time starters get the ball 33 times nowadays if they’re lucky.
Career wins: 511, Cy Young. The active leader in wins is Justin Verlander with 262. He is 41 years old and might not even get to 270.
Single-season innings pitched: 680, Will White in 1879. Logan Gilbert worked 208 ⅔ innings last season to lead the majors. I realize that MLB is trying to get the starting pitcher to take on more workload and make them more of a “main character” again, but … six hundred and eighty?
Career innings pitched: 7,356, Cy Young. Verlander is the active leader in innings with 3,415 ⅔. Max Scherzer is second with 2,878. Combine them and it’s still not even close.
For further context, Nolan Ryan pitched in parts of 27(!) seasons and was a workhorse, completing his own start 222 times. He still finished nearly 2,000 innings short of Young with 5,386 innings in his career.
Single-season strikeouts: Matt Kilroy, 513 in 1886. Tarik Skubal was the MLB leader with 228 last season. I think we’ll see 300 again, but over 500 is outrageous. If we wanted to go to the “modern” record (after the mound was moved back to 60 feet, six inches), it was Ryan with 383 in 1973 and I’m not taking that one off the table, even if it feels like a big stretch right now.
Career strikeouts: 5,714, Ryan. I don’t think anyone is going to get there, even though strikeouts are exploding these days. See above on the innings pitched. I just can’t see anyone pitching long enough to get close. Randy Johnson barely got within 1,000.
Pitching rate stats
Now, it should be noted that records keepers long ago settled on thresholds for rate stats, as well there should be. With pitching, it’s 1,000 career innings. In a single season, a qualifier is someone who threw at least one inning per team game, so, obviously, modern pitchers need to get to 162.
Career ERA: 1.82, Ed Walsh. It’s difficult to see anyone working 1,000 innings with a lower mark. I realize the game changes over time, but, if anything, baseball’s next revolution is making it easier to score runs, not harder.
Single-season ERA: This one is tricky. Negro League data is incomplete with research still ongoing, but Robert Keyes in 1944 posted a 0.64 ERA, but it was also only in 28 innings of recorded data. In 1932, Roy Parnell had a 0.83 ERA in 54 innings that we know about. On the MLB side but in 1880 — only 83 team games — Tim Keefe had a 0.86 ERA in 105 innings. This, finally, brings us to Dutch Leonard’s 0.96 ERA in 224 ⅔ innings in 1914.
Pick whichever one you want there and it seems pretty damn unbreakable, even after seeing Paul Skenes pitch to a 1.96 ERA in 133 innings as a rookie.
Batting average/hits
The “qualifying” total of plate appearances is 3.1 per team game here, so in a 162-game season, that comes out to 502.
In this day and age, pitchers are better than ever in terms of their sheer stuff. They throw harder than ever with the hardest breaking balls and the biggest arsenal of pitches the game has ever seen. Not only that, but relievers seem to roll off an assembly line throwing upper 90s with sick off-speed pitches. Those late-inning at-bats are taken against fresh pitchers with this level of stuff instead of a starting pitcher seeing the lineup for the fourth or even fifth time. That makes a big difference. The defensive players have more range and better arms than ever, too.
As such, batting average has taken a tumble. People love to bemoan the “approach” of hitters and I’ll allow those people a little leeway, but it’s outrageous to ignore the increased level of talent, collectively, on the mound and in the field, not to mention how much better scouting is these days.
Anyway, rant over. Let’s get to the stats.
Career batting average: .366, Ty Cobb. C’mon. That’s untouchable. Right? Surely, even if MLB continues to alter the rules to help hitters, a .366 career average is lunacy.
Single-season batting average: Again, the Negro League rate stat inclusion offers us some fun glimpses. Tetelo Vargas hit .471 in 136 plate appearances in the known data from 1943. The legendary Josh Gibson was found to have taken 302 recorded plate appearances in 1943 and hit .466. In going to a bulk season, we find Hugh Duffy hit .440 in 616 plate appearances in 1894. In the modern era, it’s Nap Lajoie’s .427 in 1901 and, if that isn’t late enough for you, Rogers Hornsby batted .424 in 1924.
It doesn’t matter, though, because I don’t think anyone’s ever gonna hit .400 again in a full season under anything resembling the current rules. Perhaps some rule changes would make it more attainable for a Luis Arráez type, but I’d be hard pressed to think he’s getting all the way up to .425.
Career hits: Pete Rose, 4,256. The active leader in hits right now is Freddie Freeman with 2,267. Think about what a hit machine he has been for so long. He’s 35 years old and he’s just past halfway. This one stands for an eternity.
Single-season hits: Ichiro Suzuki, 262 in 2004. I know it happened relatively recently, but I just can’t see anyone getting there for a long time unless the rules or game are changed radically. This one might be aggressive on my part, though. Bobby Witt Jr. had 211 hits last year and if MLB alters the rules to allow for more offense, maybe it’s possible? I could be persuaded here.
How about the Joe DiMaggio 56-game hitting streak?
Again, knowing all we know now and looking at the current game, do you actually think anyone could string together 57 straight games with at least one hit? Arraez is an old-school hit machine who gets a ton of at-bats and doesn’t often walk. His longest career hitting streak is 14 games.
In the 2000s, MLB has only seen 11 hitting streaks of at least 30 games and only three of at least 35. The only one longer than 35 was a 38-game streak by Jimmy Rollins that stretched from 2005 into 2006.
It’s hard to see anyone ever getting to 57.
Power stats
Career triples: 309, Sam Crawford. Only eight players ever even reached 200. The most recent player to get to 175 was Stan Musial, with 177, and he retired after 1963. The active leader (though the end of last season)? Charlie Blackmon with … 68.
Single-season triples: Owen Wilson, 36 in 1912. Just imagining someone garnering 36 triples in a season right now is pretty mind-boggling. In the 2000s, only one player ever even went over 20 (Curtis Granderson with 23 in 2007).
Career home runs: 762, Barry Bonds. I suppose some people would want to say Hank Aaron’s 755 is the “real” record and even though that isn’t true, I’ll humor you here. No one is ever going to get to 750 career home runs again, at least not as long as any of us are alive. You’ll notice I did not, however, include the single-season mark. I could totally see someone like prime Giancarlo Stanton or prime Aaron Judge come along again and get hot enough to reach 74 home runs. I just don’t think the level of dominance needed over the course of a career is gonna happen again. Keep in mind, to reach 750 home runs, a player needs to average 37.5 home runs a year for 20 years. And that still wouldn’t set the record.
Single-season RBI: Hack Wilson, 191 in 1930. Nope. No way. Manny Ramirez got to 165 in 1999 and that even sounds insane. In the era of drug testing, the highest RBI total we’ve seen is 156 from Alex Rodriguez in 2007. If we looked for someone without PED ties, the highest mark in decades is Ryan Howard’s 149 in 2006.
I didn’t list career RBI, because Albert Pujols got within 100 of Hank Aaron’s record and A-Rod came within just over 200. It seems awfully tough to get there, but I can’t be convinced to go all the way to “unbreakable.”
Getting on base
Again, these are among “qualified” players, so the requirement in a career is 3,000 plate appearances and in a season it is 3.1 plate appearances per team game.
Career on-base percentage: .482, Ted Williams. It’s just an absolutely breathtaking stat. Williams wasn’t all too far off getting on base half the time in his career. Joey Votto recently retired and was an on-base machine. Through his nine-year prime, he led the league in OBP seven times. His OBP in that timeframe was .436. In his career? It was .409. The active leader right now is Juan Soto and we know how amazing he is at getting on base. He’s at .421 right now.
Single-season OBP: .609, Barry Bonds in 2004. Get outta here. Even Williams topped out at .553. The leader last season was Judge at .458, or more than 150 points behind.
Stolen bases
Major League Baseball has changed the rules recently to make it a bit easier to steal bases. It’s a worthy goal, as base-stealing is one of the more fun aspects of baseball, especially when watching in person. Still, Ronald Acuña Jr. led the majors with 73 steals in 2023 and Elly De La Cruz led the majors with 67 in 2024.
Without even more drastic changes, it’s awfully hard to see Rickey Henderson, the GOAT. baserunner and leadoff hitter and, well, personality, getting toppled here.
Single-season stolen bases, modern era: Rickey Henderson, 130 in 1982.
Single-season stolen bases: Hugh Nicol, 138 in 1887
Career stolen bases: Rickey Henderson with 1,406. Lou Brock is second with 938 and only nine other players in history even have half as many steals as Rickey.
These all feel pretty safe.
The Ironman Streak
Cal Ripken Jr’s 2,632 consecutive games played streak is never going anywhere. That’s the equivalent of 16.247 full, 162-game seasons without ever taking a day off. Very, very few MLB players ever have the chance to even play 16 seasons, let alone never taking a day off for more than that.
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