On Base Streak

I knew the answer, though  I didn't recall what year it was.  If you are a fan of OBP, you will be properly impressed, but mostly you are only going to be interested in this if you are a Ted Williams fan. My mother adored him. The estimate is he would have hit 650+ homeruns if he had not been off doing unimportant stuff like being a fighter pilot in WWII and Korea. (There are plenty of guys over at Unz who will tell you those wars were wrong and unimportant, BTW.)

 

Even more overlooked than Ted, I'm afraid, was Stan Musial, who had a remarkable season the year before this, just missing the Triple Crown. To be famous, you pretty much had to be in New York, and generations of baseball writers seem to have grown up there. Boston was a distant second for attention in print. No one was third, fourth, or fifth. Those were considered flyover country.