MLB Records That Still Stand

Baseball keeps its records the way a family keeps old photographs: carefully, argued over at holidays, and with a few frames nobody has touched in eighty years. Joe DiMaggio’s hitting streak dates to 1941. Cy Young’s win total was complete before the First World War. When a record in this sport falls, it usually takes a player doing something the modern game is not built to allow.

This page walks through the MLB records that still stand, career first and then single season, with the context that makes each one hard to break. Figures are the official MLB record, which since May 2024 includes Negro Leagues statistics from 1920 to 1948. At the end we get to the part that matters on this site: why a record almost never decides a single game, and why record chases still move prices in the prop bet market.

Career records

Record	Holder	Mark
Hits	Pete Rose	4,256
Home runs	Barry Bonds	762
Pitching wins	Cy Young	511
Strikeouts (pitching)	Nolan Ryan	5,714
Stolen bases	Rickey Henderson	1,406
Consecutive games played	Cal Ripken Jr.	2,632
Saves	Mariano Rivera	652

Photos: Pete Rose: Unknown authorUnknown author, Public domain · Barry Bonds: Sarah Stierch, CC BY 4.0 · Cy Young: Charles M. Conlon, Public domain · Nolan Ryan: Nolan_Ryan_Tiger_Stadium_1990.jpg: Chuck Andersen derivative work: Delaywaves talk, CC BY 2.0 · Rickey Henderson: Fleer, Public domain · Cal Ripken Jr.: Maryland GovPics, CC BY 2.0 · Mariano Rivera: User Keith Allison on Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Hits and home runs

Pete Rose collected 4,256 hits over 24 seasons, most of them for the Reds. The reason nobody gets near it is simple arithmetic. A player who averages 200 hits a year, which only a handful do in any season, still needs more than 21 such seasons. Rose’s story also has a betting chapter every reader here should know: he was banned in 1989 over betting on baseball, and MLB only removed him from its permanently ineligible list in May 2025, months after his death.

Barry Bonds finished with 762 home runs, seven ahead of Hank Aaron’s 755 and 48 ahead of Babe Ruth’s 714. The number carries an asterisk in plenty of fans’ heads because of the steroid era, but it sits in the official book without one.

Pitching: wins, strikeouts and saves

Cy Young won 511 games between 1890 and 1911. Walter Johnson is second with 417, which tells you how far ahead Young is: the gap between first and second, 94 wins, would be a solid career on its own. Today a starter makes around 30 starts in a healthy year and a 15-win season earns a raise. Young’s record is safe for as long as teams use five-man rotations and pull starters in the sixth inning, which is to say forever.

Nolan Ryan’s 5,714 strikeouts lead Randy Johnson’s 4,875 by more than 800. Ryan pitched 27 seasons and threw hard into his mid-40s, a combination no front office would now plan around. Mariano Rivera’s 652 saves are the youngest of these career records, and the most exposed. Closers turn over fast, though, and the save itself has lost some prestige as teams spread high-leverage innings across several relievers.

Steals and the streak

Rickey Henderson stole 1,406 bases. Lou Brock is second at 938. Henderson’s lead over second place is almost 50 percent, the most lopsided career record in the game. The 2023 rule changes brought stealing back (bigger bases and limits on pickoff throws), yet even the new-era leaders would need two decades of 70-steal seasons.

Cal Ripken Jr. played in 2,632 straight games from 1982 until he sat himself on September 20, 1998. He had already passed Lou Gehrig’s 2,130 on September 6, 1995. Load management did not exist as a phrase when Ripken played; now it is standard policy, and a player trying to chase this streak would be benched by his own team long before year eight.

Single-season records

Record	Holder	Mark	Season
Home runs	Barry Bonds	73	2001
Home runs (AL)	Aaron Judge	62	2022
Hits	Ichiro Suzuki	262	2004
Batting average	Josh Gibson	.466	1943
RBI	Hack Wilson	191	1930
Stolen bases (since 1900)	Rickey Henderson	130	1982

Photos: Barry Bonds: Sarah Stierch, CC BY 4.0 · Aaron Judge: The White House, Public domain · Ichiro Suzuki: Jeffrey Hayes, CC BY 2.0 · Josh Gibson: Harrison Studio, Public domain · Hack Wilson: Conlon, Charles Martin, 1868-1945 (Photographer), Public domain · Rickey Henderson: Fleer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Home runs

Bonds hit 73 home runs in 2001, three years after Mark McGwire’s 70 had seemed like the end of the conversation. The number people argue about more is 62. Aaron Judge hit his 62nd on October 4, 2022, in Arlington, breaking the American League record Roger Maris had held since 1961. For many fans that is the record that matters, because it came after testing with penalties began in 2004.

Hits, average and the .400 line

Ichiro Suzuki had 262 hits for Seattle in 2004, breaking George Sisler’s 257 from 1920. Sisler’s record had lasted 84 years. Ichiro did it mostly with singles and speed, the opposite of how the modern game is built. Hitters now walk more, strike out more and swing for extra bases, and a 200-hit season has become rare on its own.

The batting average record changed without anyone swinging a bat. When MLB added Negro Leagues statistics to the official record in 2024, Josh Gibson’s .466 for the 1943 Homestead Grays became the single-season high, and Gibson also took the career lead from Ty Cobb. Hugh Duffy’s .440 from 1894 had topped the list before that.

Ted Williams remains the last man to finish a season at .400 or better. He hit .406 in 1941, and the way he got there is a small lesson in taking risk on purpose. Williams was at .3995 on the final day, which would have rounded to .400. He played both games of a doubleheader in Philadelphia anyway and went 6-for-8.

Hack Wilson’s 191

Hack Wilson drove in 191 runs for the Cubs in 1930. For decades the book said 190, until a review of box scores led MLB to credit him with a missing RBI in 1999. Lou Gehrig’s 184 in 1931 is next. Nobody has seriously threatened either mark in the expansion era, partly because lineups no longer stack high-average hitters in front of a slugger the way the 1930 Cubs did in a year when the whole National League hit like a softball team.

Game and streak records

Some of the best records are about one afternoon or one hot month rather than a career.

Twenty strikeouts in a nine-inning game is the top mark, and it is shared. Roger Clemens did it twice for Boston (April 29, 1986 and September 18, 1996), Kerry Wood did it as a Cubs rookie on May 6, 1998, and Max Scherzer did it for Washington on May 11, 2016, using only 119 pitches. Randy Johnson also struck out 20 over nine innings on May 8, 2001, but the game went to extra innings, so it does not count toward the nine-inning record. The overall high is 21, by Tom Cheney in a 16-inning game in 1962.

Joe DiMaggio hit safely in 56 straight games from May 15 to July 17, 1941, when two plays at third base by Cleveland’s Ken Keltner stopped him. Pete Rose’s 44 in 1978 is the closest anyone has come in the decades since. Orel Hershiser threw 59 consecutive scoreless innings from August 30 to September 28, 1988, one more than Don Drysdale’s 58 from 1968. Drysdale was in the Dodgers broadcast booth when it happened.

Perfect games are rare enough that each one gets a name. There have been 24 in American and National League history. The most recent is Domingo German’s for the Yankees at Oakland on June 28, 2023, and neither 2024 nor 2025 produced another.

Then there is the newest entry on the list, which is not a record so much as a club of one. On September 19, 2024, Shohei Ohtani went 6-for-6 with three home runs and two steals at Miami and became the first player with 50 homers and 50 steals in a season. He finished at 54 and 59.

What this means for betting

Here is the honest part. A record almost never changes the price of a single game. The baseball betting lines for tonight’s game are built from the two starting pitchers, the lineups, the bullpens and the park, and a slugger sitting at 58 home runs is one hitter out of eighteen. Books do not move a moneyline because history is watching.

Where records and streaks do move numbers is in player props and futures. A hitting streak draws public money on “over 0.5 hits”, and a player chasing a round number pulls action on his home run prop. The book knows this and shades the price. Say a hitter’s anytime home run prop would be +400 on his true chance, which is 20 percent. During a chase it might be listed at +320. At +400 a $50 bet returns $250 including stake; at +320 it returns $210. Same player, same pitcher, $40 less for the story. Our odds calculators will convert both prices into implied probability so you can see the gap for yourself.

Streaks deserve the most suspicion. DiMaggio’s streak survived several games where he got one hit in his last at-bat, which is what streaks look like from the inside: a long run of near misses that happened to fall the right way. A player with a 20-game hitting streak has roughly the same chance of a hit tonight as his season numbers and the matchup say. Look at who he is facing on the probable pitchers page, not at the streak counter on the broadcast.

Records can also mislead you on game totals. A pitcher chasing a scoreless streak or a strikeout milestone is still the same pitcher, and his manager will pull him on the same pitch count. If you are looking at a first-inning bet in one of those starts, our NRFI rates by team and starter are a better guide than the headline, and for the bigger picture of how the modern game treats pitchers, the baseball history timeline shows how workloads fell over a century.

Set a budget before any futures or prop bet tied to a milestone, because those markets are built to be fun, and fun gets expensive. You must be 21 or older to bet legally in most US states, and if betting stops being fun, 1-800-GAMBLER is free and confidential. If you are new here, the home page is the best place to see what else we track.

Records worth watching

Most of the marks above are closed. A few are worth keeping an eye on because the modern game makes them reachable, and those are the ones books will price as a market sooner or later.

The American League home run record gets tested whenever a big right-handed or left-handed power hitter is healthy for a full season in a friendly park. Season-long stolen base totals climbed after 2023, although the league’s success rate eased back from 80.2 percent in 2023 to 77.7 percent in 2025 as pitchers and catchers adjusted. And the 50/50 season now exists as a benchmark, so the next great power-speed player will face futures and props built around it. When you see one of those markets, treat the round number as the book’s marketing and the player’s recent plate discipline as the real information.