Written by Eric Wilbur at Boston.com
It isn’t the longest…yet.
But is Jackie Bradley Jr.’s current hitting streak the greatest of its kind in Red Sox history?
With a hit on Tuesday night against the Colorado Rockies at Fenway Park, Bradley would extend his streak to 28 games, tying him with Wade Boggs for the fourth-longest in franchise annals. In 1985, the Hall of Famer Boggs, who will have his No. 26 retired at Fenway later this week, hit .402 over his four weeks of good fortune, hitting one home run with a 1.007 OPS.
Johnny Damon’s 29-game hitting streak in 2005 would be next on the list for Bradley to surmount. Damon hit .348 over the course of his streak, with three home runs and a .916 OPS. Nomar Garciaparra hit in 30 straight during his 1997 rookie season, batting .383, with nine home runs and a 1.059 OPS.
Of course, it’s Joe DiMaggio’s own brother, Dom, who owns the Red Sox record, hitting in 34 straight games in 1949, eight seasons after Joe set the mark of Americana with 56. Dom DiMaggio hit .352 during his, with three home runs and a .934 OPS.
Bradley has a higher streak batting average than Boggs (.408), the highest OPS of any of the aforementioned (1.272), and is one home shy of Garciaparra with eight since it all began on April 24.
If we were to ask late paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, however, the inclination is that he’d tend to still lean toward Dom DiMaggio’s feat as the greatest in Boston history.
It is the former Harvard professor’s 1988 essay, “The Streak of Streaks” in The New York Review of Books that pays homage to Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak by classifying it as “both the greatest factual achievement in the history of baseball and a principal icon of American mythology.” Gould’s baseball essays (published posthumously in 2004’s “Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville: A Lifelong Passion for Baseball”) married the scientist’s affection for the game with his life’s work, and his view on DiMaggio’s streak is much loftier than anything else in baseball that might have been attained by chance of a coin.
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