When Coco Crisp and Kurt Suzuki went deep for the A’s on Thursday, it snapped a streak of 32 straight games in which they had either one or no homers, CSN Bay Area reports.
I couldn’t help but think that was an awfully long time to go without a two-homer game. But as it turns out, it wasn’t even the current longest active streak in baseball.
The Padres have gone 44 straight games without hitting two homers. Now, that is a very long time. It’s the longest such streak by a major league team since 1992.
In fact, five teams had 40-game streaks in 1992, the last year before offense began to take off in the mid-90s:
1. Dodgers - Aug. 23, 1992-April 16, 1993 - 50 games
2. Cardinals - May 17, 1992-July 9, 1992 - 48 games
3. Brewers - July 18, 1992-Sept. 4, 1992 - 46 games
4. Dodgers - May 31, 1992-July 17, 1992 - 46 games
5. Mets - June 22, 1992-Aug. 8, 1992 - 41 games
Since then, the longest streak any team had was the Marlins, going 39 straight games in 1998. The longest streak over the last decade was 36 games, held by the 2008 Twins.
If the Padres are going to break the streak before it gets to 50 games, they’ll have to do it against the Mariners or Giants, two of the best pitching staffs in baseball.
The Padres, for what it’s worth, have hit 20 homers in 44 games during the streak. They have 45 homers in 82 games for the season. Ryan Ludwick has hit 10 of them, while no one else has more than five.
Regardless, it’s a safe bet they won’t be challenging any major league records. The 1979 Astros went 125 games without hitting multiple homers, and many teams had longer streaks prior to World War II.