High school softball pitcher Rachele Fico recently threw her 22nd career perfect game. In one of her more recent perfect games, she struck out all 21 opposing hitters (softball games are seven innings long).

NCAA Division II player Bo Darby of West Virginia State homered in five straight at-bats recently, part of a lengthier power-hitting exhibition that included a total of six home runs in a double-header and a single and double right before the homer barrage even started.

ESPN "Rise," an outlet for coverage of up-and-coming high school athletes, reports on Florida prep Patrick Schuster's quest for a fifth straight no-hitter today. The high school record is six.

UPDATE: The streak is over.

I'm a few days late in reporting this, but Kansas City pitcher Zack Greinke had his scoreless innings streak come to an end.

Kansas City Royals pitcher Zack Greinke has now thrown 34 consecutive scoreless innings, carrying over from the end of last season.

The ESPN.com blog True Hoop, by Henry Abbott, had a major write-up the other day about the study of streak shooting in basketball (including a cite of the Hot Hand blog). The accompanying hot-hand study from Sportsmetricians is also worth reading.

Angel Cabrera won the Masters golf tournament today, defeating Chad Campbell and Kenny Perry in a three-way playoff. The streakiest performances, however, were by two players who lifted themselves considerably in the standings, but not quite far enough to make the playoff. Phil Mickelson birdied six out of seven holes early in the fourth round, whereas first-time Masters contestant John Merrick birdied four straight late in the fourth round.

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Earlier in the day, I randomly stumbled upon a televised women's bowling event, just as one of the competitors, Carolyn Dorin-Ballard, was in the midst of a streak that ultimately stretched to 20 consecutive strikes. The streak was said to be the longest in a televised Professional Bowlers Association event.

UPDATE: I have now found an online article documenting Dorin-Ballard's new record.

Oklahoma's pitchers shut out Texas Tech for 20 straight innings in Big 12 baseball action, before the Red Raiders scored in the third inning of Game 3 of the teams' series. The Sooners won the first two games, 6-0 and 4-0, but Texas Tech took the finale, 5-1.

In the opening round of the Masters golf tournament earlier today, Chad Campbell set a tournament record by getting a birdie on the first five holes.

UPDATE: To probe a little more into Campbell's opening-round performance, I decided to estimate the probability of his five straight birdies (assuming that he's a typical golfer). A total of 96 golfers began play. For each of the holes in Round 1 -- including the first five, which were of primary interest -- the number of golfers who broke par (most frequently by birdie, but also occasionally by eagle) is available here. The numbers of par-busters for each hole, which when divided by 96 yields a probability of breaking par, are as follows:

Hole..........Par-Busters..........Probability

1.............7 (all birdie)............07

2.............46 (incl. 2 eagles).......48

3.............30 (incl. 1 eagle)........31

4.............4 (all birdie)............04

5.............11 (all birdie)...........11

Multiplying these probabilities together yields roughly .00005, which is 5-in-100,000 or 1-in-20,000.

Some cautions must attach to this probability. First, it was a post-hoc decision to calculate it. To paraphrase a warning I once received from a prominent statistician, no one presumably was asking before the tournament, "What are the odds that Chad Campbell is going to birdie his first five holes?" The very unusualness of the accomplishment is what prompted me to analyze it.

Second, even if we accept the 1-in-20,000 probability, with large numbers of professional golfers playing large numbers of holes in large numbers of tournaments, the feat of five straight birdies is one that may be expected to occur every so often.

Welcome to visitors who followed the link from today's St. Louis Post-Dispatch article on the University of Connecticut's quest for an undefeated season in tonight's NCAA women's basketball championship game. The article's author, Tom Timmermann, and I were both sportswriters for the UCLA Daily Bruin in the early 1980s. He contacted me yesterday to discuss what the odds might be of a team completing an undefeated season, and I think he's done a nice job of distilling what we discussed.

Arizona State softball slugger Kaitlin Cochran had her streak of a home-run in seven straight games snapped Saturday at Washington (box score). The game only went five innings instead of the regulation seven, as the Huskies' 11-3 lead triggered the mercy rule to end the game; under ordinary circumstances, therefore, Cochran probably would have gotten an additional plate appearance. A tip of the batting helmet to the folks at Ultimate College Softball, who pointed out the streak.

Cross-posted at my College Softball Blog.

Oklahoma missed its first 15 three-point attempts, ultimately going 2-of-19 for the day, in a 72-60 loss to North Carolina in the NCAA's South men's basketball regional final.

Villanova's just-concluded win over Pitt in a thrilling East regional men's basketball final contained a couple of impressive streaky performances. Villanova made its first 21 free-throw attempts as a team and finished 22-of-23. For Pitt, forward DeJuan Blair was 9-of-9 from the field (article, box score).

The NCAA men's and women's basketball tournaments always feature a number of team and individual stretches of hotness and coldness. Tonight's Oklahoma-Syracuse men's game featured what may have been the most pronounced stretch of dominance thus far.

With the Sooners leading by only a slight 28-24 margin with roughly two minutes to go in the first half, OU went on a 20-2 run (carrying over from the first to the second half) to increase its lead to 48-26. Eventually, it became a 28-5 run (OU's lead expanding to 56-29), before Syracuse even started to make a dent in the lead. A fairly large dent did the Orange manage, but it wasn't nearly enough as Syracuse fell 84-71 (play-by-play sheet).

During part of the time they were blowing the game open, the Sooners made 10 out of 11 field-goal attempts. OU's Tony Crocker, whose shooting played a major part in the Sooners' run, made six of his first eight three-point attempts of the game, as noted in the above-linked article.

Last night, another Big 12 team, Missouri, unleashed a 27-7 run on Memphis, en route to a 102-91 victory.

Seen any other big streaks? Share them in the Comments section!

Not since LeBron James in a 2007 NBA playoff game can I remember a single player taking over his team's scoring load to the degree that Texas Tech's Mike Singletary did in tonight's opening-round win by the Red Raiders over Texas A&M in the Big 12 tournament, 88-83.

In addition to Singletary's offensive prowess, the game was also noteworthy for Texas Tech's big comeback. A&M had led by 21 points early in the second half and by 18 with roughly 15 minutes left in the game. After a few different Red Raiders contributed points to cut the lead to 10 with roughly 10 minutes remaining, Singletary took over.

The graphic below documents what happened. I've copied and pasted part of ESPN.com's play-by-play sheet, editing out Texas A&M's side of the ledger and annotating all of Singletary's shots within the relevant time frame (green and red for field-goal attempts, blue for free-throw attempts; numbers equal point values and an "x" is for a miss). You can click on the chart to enlarge it.


From this chart, one can see several aspects of Singletary's amazing performance:

*He scored 29 straight Texas Tech points, part of his total of 43 points on the night.

*He made 9 out of 10 field-goal attempts, including a perfect 3-of-3 on threes. At a muscular 6-6, 230 pounds, Singletary arguably looks more like a linebacker than an outside-shooting specialist, and indeed he really hasn't jacked up many trey attempts during his time at Texas Tech (career statistics). As best I can tell, Singletary is not related to the legendary former NFL linebacker bearing the same name.

*He made 8 out of 10 free throws (not exactly amazing, but not bad, either).

As described here and on my College Softball Blog, University of Washington softball pitcher Danielle Lawrie had her streak ended, of 90 consecutive innings without giving up an earned run. A member of Canada's 2008 Olympic team, Lawrie probably won't give up many more runs this season!

I hope you'll excuse some Maize 'n Blue bias on my part, but the University of Michigan (my graduate school alma mater) picked up a huge men's basketball win at Minnesota, 67-64, which may propel the Wolverines into the NCAA tournament field. Michigan (14-of-15) and Minnesota (18-of-19) each shot superbly from the free-throw line (box score).

The outside shooting of the Wolverines' Laval Lucas-Perry was the real difference-maker, as he hit three straight from behind the arc, beginning with 11:13 remaining in the game and Michigan trailing, 53-43 (play-by-play sheet).

Going back to the free-throw statistics, the Gophers came into the game hitting from the stripe with a .715 percentage (see pregame notes), although they also had a 13-of-14 FT performance earlier this season at Penn State.

According to this binomial calculator, the probability of a team with a prior .715 success rate making 18 (or more) out of 19 free-throw attempts is around .02 (2-in-100).

Michigan came in with a .748 free-throw percentage. With this baserate, the Wolverines' probability of making 14 (or more) out of 15 is around .08. For the joint occurrence of Minnesota's and Michigan's hot free-throw shooting, we would then multiply .02 X .08, which yields .0016, which we'll round to .002 (2-in-1,000). This calculation assumes the two teams' free-throw shooting performances are independent of each other; this might not be true as, with each team seeing how well the other was shooting free-throws, the Gophers and Wolverines could have influenced each other to shoot better from the stripe. Still, the two teams' combined free-throw shooting seems pretty unique!

The New York Times has an article on how the overall success rate on free-throw attempts has remained remarkably consistent over the last 50 years or so, both in collegiate and professional basketball. What, if anything, aggregate, league-wide, statistics have to say about individual performers' tendencies to stay in a "zone" of consistent proficiency (as opposed to the potential volatility of "hot" and "cold" stretches) is something to contemplate.

The Miami Heat lived up to its name last night, getting hot enough to go on a late 19-0 run to beat the New York Knicks.

ESPN.com reports on "the greatest streak in the history of college varsity sports; you've never heard of it."