Steady hitting worthy of praise

An amazing, historic and largely underappreciated streak came to
an end this past Friday. Chase Utley, a UCLA alumnus playing for
the Philadelphia Phillies, got a hit in 35 consecutive games. The
streak is tied for the 10th-longest hitting streak of all time, and
the fourth-longest since World War II.

Hitting streaks in baseball do get publicity, but they
aren’t nearly as popular as some of the season-long
statistical quests such as Barry Bonds’ 73 home runs or
hitting .400.

Hitting streaks are harder, in a way, than season-long records.
You can theoretically compile enough home runs, hits, strikeouts or
any other stat early in the season to make breaking a record at the
end of the year relatively easy. If someone hit 60 homers in the
first half of the season, it’d be easy to hit 13 in the
second half. But with hitting streaks, you can’t stockpile
the number of games in which you’ve gotten a hit. You can
only get one game at a time, like the classic sports
cliché.

Hitting streaks require an unprecedented amount of consistency.
While going 4-for-4 one night and 0-for-4 the following night would
still be a great two-game stretch, it would kill your hitting
streak. To maintain a hitting streak, you have to get a hit every
single day, against many different pitchers, playing in different
cities and time zones.

During and after the streak, Utley reportedly didn’t say
much to the press about his own performance, but did talk about Joe
DiMaggio’s record 56-game hitting streak and how tough it
would be to duplicate.

“You have to have some luck on your side, because some
days you feel great at the plate and you can hit four balls on the
nose and make four outs,” Utley told the Philadelphia
Inquirer. “And there are days you feel terrible and you can
squib a ball or hit a broken-bat single and there you go, you have
a hit. To do it almost two months straight? To me, that’s
amazing.”

While you do have to have some luck to have a hitting streak,
you have to have a lot of skill too. Hitting the ball really hard
improves your chances of getting a hit. So does hitting the ball
often, and not swinging and missing. Utley did both of those during
his streak, hitting .405 in those 35 games with 25 extra base
hits.

“He was hitting the ball hard almost every time up,”
Phillies manager Charlie Manuel told the Inquirer.
“That’s the thing I remember the most. Smoking the
ball.”

Most of baseball’s all-time hitting streaks came in the
early days of baseball, back when the hitters had a lot of
advantages that no longer exist.

Batters would routinely come up against the same pitcher for all
nine innings, instead of facing the specialized bullpens of today.
Even when they were on the road, they were generally in a familiar
environment, as each league only had eight teams, and they played
the same seven teams 22 times a year. Nowadays, the two leagues
have 14 and 16 teams, and interleague play exists, meaning teams
play in a lot of different cities where they’re not used to
playing.

Also in the modern day, teams frequently have to play day games
after night games and play games only a few hours after
cross-country plane flights.

So Utley’s streak was truly historic, yet also ““
along with the few other recent long hitting streaks ““ will
largely be forgotten.

E-mail Quiñonez at gquinonez@media.ucla.edu.

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