Unbreakable records

I've seen some posts around the tubes lately talking about "unbreakable records". Cy Young's 511 wins, Joe Dimaggio's 56-game hitting streak, those sorts of things.

To call a record "unbreakable" is short-sighted. Forever is a mighty long time, as Prince reminded us, and MLB is only 136 years old. Go forward a couple of centuries and most of the so-called unbreakable records will be broken, and if rules, managerial styles or playing conditions change, maybe all of them.

If Vince Coleman was a better hitter, Rickey Henderson's career- and single-season stolen base records could have been surpassed before he retired. We could see a challenger arise as soon as next year in young Billy Hamilton, who swiped a blistering 155 bases this year and led both the California League and the Southern League by wide margins in the same season. Hamilton will turn 22 on Sunday.

If Ichiro Suzuki started his career in the United States instead of Japan, Pete Rose's hits record would already be in his sights after only 25 years. Lou Gehrig's "unbreakable" consecutive-games streak lasted less than 60. Two no-hitters in a row, if you can call two consecutive anythings a record, is just a matter of time - Johnny Vander Meer was a .500 pitcher who had one outstanding week. For all we know, Justin Verlander could match it or top it yet this season, or like Vander Meer, some random pitcher could just happen to have the greatest week of his life.

Here are some hypotheticals:

Some kid comes out of high school with the ability to control a mystifying knuckleball, jumps straight to the majors and pitches, like Phil Niekro or Hoyt Wilhelm, until he's almost 50 and wins 15-22 games a season over a 30-year career.

The next Nolan Ryan doesn't take six years after his debut to become a dominating strikeout artist. Or the next Randy Johnson signs out of high school instead of after college, gets a four-year head start, and maybe another thousand strikeouts.

The next Satchel Paige, Oscar Charleston, Double-Duty Radcliffe or Josh Gibson gets to play a full career in the majors. 

The next Bob Feller, Ted Williams, Hank Greenberg or Joe DiMaggio doesn't go off to war for several years in the prime of his career.

Baseball catches on in China and India, quadrupling the number of young men who want to play baseball. Should they ever share the passion of the Dominican Republic, population 10 million, it would revolutionize the game.

And some hypotheticals involving fundamentals:

A future commissioner drops the five-inning requirement for a starting pitcher to qualify for a win and rules that the pitchers of record at the time of the last lead change get the decisions. Score big early? Pull your starter and run him out there again tomorrow or the next day. A staff ace on a team with a dominating offense could start 50 games in a season and win 40.

A team that can't afford big power hitters has its local governments build them a stadium the size of a dead-ball park (West Side Grounds in Chicago was 560 feet to center). They sign doubles-hitters who become triples-hitters with the added real estate, and somebody wipes out Wahoo Sam Crawford's record of 309 career triples and Owen Wilson's single-season record of 36. Maybe we see a return of the .400 hitter.

Or on the other end of the spectrum, a team builds a ballpark with the smallest field dimensions allowed under the rules, designs it to take advantage of an area with strong winds, and can afford the game's top power hitters by selling 80,000 tickets a game to people who come from far and wide to see the daily slugfests.

Someday 64 teams dilute the talent pool, all with retractable domes that allow MLB to expand the season to 220 games, starting right after the Super Bowl and playing through Thanksgiving. Most cumulative records fall within a generation or two.

Youth leagues teach pitchers to develop endurance from an early age, just like long-distance runners, instead of babying them with pitch-counts that encourage them to throw as hard as they can instead of learning how to pace themselves and become pitchers instead of throwers.

So instead of comparing past and present stars with an unknown future, recognize them as the greatest among their peers, or the best among a span of generations. The fact that Babe Ruth's home run records have fallen doesn't make him less of a legend than Joe DiMaggio just because DiMaggio's defining record still stands.