Friday open thread: your favorite unbreakable records

Happy Friday!

It’s baseball season again, which I know not everyone cares about, but bear with me here because this will open up to non-baseball things soon enough. The Seattle Mariners, the first sports team I ever loved and the longest sports relationship I’ve ever had (almost 40 years now!) were supposed to be rebuilding this year, and were supposed to be dire.

They’re not.

They’re currently 13-2, the best record in all of MLB, and they’re fun as heck to watch. They’re scoring for fun - they’ve already scored 117 runs this season in those 15 games. For the math fans in the audience, that’s an average of 7.8 runs a game. If they kept that average up over an entire season, that would mean they’ll score 1,263 runs.

How many is that? Well, the all-time record for runs scored in a season by a team is 1,220, so it’s not like they’d destroy that record. Until you stop to realize that that record was set in 1894, and no MLB team has scored 1,000 runs in a season since 1950.

Now, let’s get real. The Mariners are not going to continue to score almost eight runs a game every day between now and October. They are going to crash back to earth and become mortal again, but until they do, they’re a ton of fun to watch.

But doing the research for that little dive into basic numbers brought up a question in my mind. The M’s are not going to break the record for runs scored in a season, because no team is in this era of baseball, but that got me thinking about records that are untouchable or seemingly so.

Most of mine come from baseball, but I think my favorite one is not a single record, but a set of records. Those records all concern the triple - a three-base hit that is, sadly, extremely rare these days. The record for most triples in a season is 36, by Chief Wilson in 1912; the record for most career triples is held by Sam Crawford, who played from 1899-1917, and in that time hit 309 triples.

There is no current major league player who will even get to 175 triples in his career, so I think all the records concerning triples in a game, season, league, career, etc., are all pretty safe. Same with the stolen base record - the evolution of the game has severely devalued both the triple and the SB to the point where those records can probably be retired.

What about you? What are some of your favorite seemingly-unbreakable sports records, in any sport?

Also feel free to talk about anything else that’s on your mind - it’s open thread Friday!