Joe DiMaggio's 56 game hitting streak in 1941 is one of baseball's most storied records. Baseball fans often debate whether it will ever be broken.

It turns out that it's impossible analytically to figure out the odds of someone hitting safely in 56 straight games.

Two new papers published in The Baseball Research Journal, No 32, one of SABR's publications (sorry not available online), have used simulated seasons (ain't computers grand!) to calculate the odds of this feat happening.

Joe D'Aniello ("DiMaggio's Hitting Streak: High 'Hit Average' the Key") simulated the exact 56 games of the streak using Joltin' Joe's "hit average" (hits divided by plate appearances) during the streak of .370. (Hit average differs from the more conventional batting average by using plate appearances in the denominator instead of at bats.) Out of 2 million runs of those 56 games, the simulated DiMaggio hit safely in all 56 just 31 times. Thus the odds are only .0000155.

Separately, Bob Brown and Peter Goodrich, Management professors at Providence College, simulated the likelihood that someone like DiMaggio would hit safely 56 or more times in a row at any time during a 139 game season ("Calculating the Odds: DiMaggio's 56-Game Hitting Streak). Using Joe's 1936-40 mean hit average of .314 and mean plate appearances per game of 4.5, they find that the odds of hitting safely in exactly 56 games in a row at some point during the season to be .000054 and hitting 56 or more in a row to be .000222.

So how impressive was it to hit 56 in a row? Over the course of the simulation, the average hitting streak was about 19 games long with a standard deviation of about 5 leading the authors to conclude that, "what happened in 1941 is the equivalent, more or less, of reaching into the adult American male population and pulling out someone 3' taller than 'Shaq'."

My take: Ain't nobody gonna break that record.