Sunday, May 31, 2009

Tennis great Rafael Nadal had his 31-match winning streak at the French Open halted. As one of the Grand Slam tournaments (along with Wimbledon, and the U.S. and Australian Opens), the French Open has a 128-player draw for men's (and women's) singles. A player therefore must win seven straight matches to take the French championship in a given year. Nadal had won the last four men's singles championships, plus his first three matches this year.

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In NCAA men's regional baseball action, the University of Texas beat Boston College, 3-2, in an amazing 25-inning game. Perhaps even more remarkable than the overall length of the game, Longhorn reliever Austin Wood pitched 12-plus innings of no-hit ball!

Thursday, May 21, 2009

The Detroit News has an article on the 25th anniversary of the 1984 Detroit Tigers' 35-5 start to the season (thanks to Mark Pattison for bringing the article to my attention).

Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Boston Red Sox slugger David "Big Papi" Ortiz finally ended his long homerless streak.

Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Two long baseball streaks ended today:

Howard College, which came into today's round of the National Junior College Athletic Association baseball regionals with a 57-0 record, lost to Temple College, 8-2. Howard is still alive under the double-elimination format, but the chance at a virtually unheard-of undefeated baseball season is gone. [UPDATE: Howard indeed went on to win the national JC title.]

The Washington Nationals' Ryan Zimmerman had his 30-game hitting streak ended today against San Francisco, going 0-for-3.

Tuesday, May 05, 2009

I've just created a Facebook group in conjunction with this blog, and I invite everybody to join. The Facebook group will be a venue for getting previews of analyses I'm working on, batting around ideas, sharing instances of sports streakiness any of us have recently seen, etc. In short, it will be for exchanging brief bits of information that might not warrant full postings on the blog. Just search within Facebook under "Hot Hand in Sports."