Willy make it?

Willy Taveras of the Houston Astros has hit safely in twenty-seven straight games. He's the latest to threaten a thirty-game hitting streak. All current streaks can be found at Baseball Musings. Unless you've been cruising around the world in an unpowered sailboat, you already know that Chase Utley put together a thirty-five game streak earlier this season, and Jimmy Rollins, his Phillies teammate, extended his streak to thirty-eight in the first two games of the season.

What you may not know about hitting streaks of this caliber is just how rare they are in Major League Baseball. Stretching all the way back to 1876, only forty-one such streaks have occurred. Two players—Ty Cobb and George Sisler—own two apiece. No one else has done it more than once. In the chart below, you can see another curiosity: there were no 30-game hitting streaks between 1950 and 1969. That's an eighteen-year drought! If anyone wants to try to explain this, I'm listening. While we're happily looking at charts, here's the histogram of hitting streak lengths. So, just how likely is Taveras to join this club? Of those who have reached 30 games, more than two-thirds (68.3%) have reached 31. And of those, three-quarters have made 32. Here are the percentages:

Games	% Moving On
30	68
31	75
32	100
33	81
34	82
35	64

If you're hitting around .400, which many of these guys are during such a streak, and you get four at bats in a game, you have about an 87% chance of continuing your streak on any given night, assuming approximate independence among at bats. But Taveras is only hitting .339 during his streak, so he's right at 80% for four at bats. Three more games at 80% each is just about even odds.