The Night Joe DiMaggio's 56-Game Streak Ended
On July 17, 1941, Joe DiMaggio went hitless at Cleveland's Municipal Stadium, ending his 56-game hitting streak — a record that still stands.
For two months in the summer of 1941, America had a daily ritual: check whether Joe DiMaggio got a hit. The New York Yankees' center fielder had hit safely in 56 straight games, a streak that began on May 15 and turned into a national obsession. Newspapers tracked it. Fans held their breath through every at-bat. Rival managers rearranged their pitching rotations just to try to stop him.
On July 17, the streak came to Cleveland's Municipal Stadium, and 67,468 fans — an enormous crowd for a night game — packed in to see if number 57 was coming. The Cleveland Indians had other plans. Their third baseman, Ken Keltner, played the game of his life, twice robbing DiMaggio with backhanded stops on hard-hit ground balls. DiMaggio finished the night hitless in three at-bats with one walk. The streak was over at 56.
The Yankees clubhouse was, by one account, as quiet as it had ever been after a win. DiMaggio faced the press and posed for photographers with his thumb and forefinger forming a zero — his hit total for the night. "The whole thing was bound to stop sooner or later," he said. Asked how he felt, he admitted, "I'm not happy that I failed to get a hit. I guess relieved would be the better word." His only real complaint was to a teammate: he had missed out on a $10,000 bonus from Heinz 57 if the streak had reached the company's magic number.
The numbers from the run were staggering. DiMaggio batted .408 with 15 home runs and 55 runs batted in, collecting 91 hits — and striking out just five times. The Yankees went 41-13-2 during the streak. And in a detail that captures the man, the day after the streak died, he started a new one, hitting safely in his next 16 games — safely in 72 of 73. He had even played through grief to keep it going: when his former teammate Lou Gehrig died on June 2, DiMaggio went 2-for-4 that day.
That fall, DiMaggio was voted the American League's Most Valuable Player — edging out Boston's Ted Williams, who had hit .406 that season, the last .400 average in baseball history. Nobody has come close to 56 since. The nearest challenger, Pete Rose, reached 44 in 1978.
The streak endures because it may be the most unbreakable record in sports. In an era of specialized relievers and defensive shifts, hitting safely in 56 consecutive games looks more impossible every year. But the lasting image of that July night in Cleveland isn't failure — it's a ballplayer tipping his cap to a third baseman who simply played better, while a whole country exhaled at once.
No verified public-domain or Creative Commons landscape photograph of DiMaggio from this era could be found, so this story is published without an image.
