Ildemaro Vargas’s 27-game hit streak: an analysis

And, so, it ends. By going 0-for-4 today, Vargas’s streak ended at 27 games. That’s still the second longest in franchise history. You have to go all the way back to the early stages of the franchise’s sophomore season in 1999, to find the only bigger streak. Club legend Luis Gonzalez reached 30 games between April 11 and May 18 that year. But, as we’ll see, there are grounds for thinking Ildemaro’s may be more impressive, given the offensive environment of the time. It’s been a while since any D-back has come close to approaching Gonzo. Over the past twenty years, just three reached 20 games: Paul Goldschmidt (26 in 2013-14), Ketel Marte (21 in 2024) and Vargas. Here’s the top dozen.

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What’s most impressive is, nobody saw this coming. Of all the people potentially to challenge the record in 2026, he was likely among the longest odds. Corbin Carroll? Sure. Ketel Marte? Of course, especially given his previous 21-game streak. They have a far better track record. For most of the other entries on the chart above, the players concerned were well known to be decent hitters. Even the notoriously light-hitting Tony Womack came in to the 2000 season with a .278 career average. But at the end of last year, when the streak was just three games old, Vargas was a career .249 hitter. His previous high hit streak before this? Just ten games, in 2022 when he was with Washington.

The 24-game streak at the start of the season makes it particularly impressive. That’s the longest streak to open a campaign for fifty years. Ron LeFlore of Detroit reached thirty at the beginning of 1976. Doing so also allows Vargas to get into some uncharted territory elsewhere. At the end of the streak yesterday, he was batting .404 on the season with 99 PA in the books. That’s comfortably the deepest into the season that an Arizona player has been able to post a .400 average. Here are the five previous D-backs with the most PA to reach the .400 mark (only stats at the end of the game being counted):

3. 64 PA: Greg Colbrunn, May 25, 2000, BA .404

4. 60 PA: Orlando Hudson, April 15, 2007, BA .411

Gonzalez came achingly close to smashing them all, including Vargas. On June 4th, 1999 he went 2-for-4 and raised his average for the season to .398. That was as close as he got in a meaningful size. But that .398 did come over a much longer period, covering 227 plate-appearances and 201 at-bats. On the surface, that’s much more impressive than Vargas. Except, 1999 was a very different era, as Jack reminded me on X. There are reasons hit streaks of over 25 games have become much less frequent. The overall batting average that year was .271: this year, it’s .243. Put another way, if we assume 4 AB per game, a league average batter hitting 25 games in a row was roughly five times more likely in 1999.

The actual results bear this out. We asked Baseball Reference for all the hitting streaks of 25 games within a single season during the divisional era, led by Pete Rose’s 44 games in 1979. There were 82 all told over the fifty-seven seasons from 1969-2025, so about one and a half per year. But there have only been six since the end of 2016, and none of those got past 26 games. [Vargas’s season-spanner doesn’t count, of course] In contrast, 2011 alone had four, two of which reached the thirty-game checkpoint. Things peaked, unsurprisingly, in 1999, with six 25+ streaks. Gonzo’s 30-game run was surpassed later in the year by Vlad Guerrero reaching 31.

The other unexpected bonus in this being an early-season surge, is seeing a Diamondback hitter as the #1 for the batting title. When was the last time a Diamondback was in that position? The most literal answer is boring, albeit with a surprising name. Jeff Mathis went 3-for-4 on Opening Day 2017, and that .750 batting average was tied with six others for the major-league lead after that day. But that’s also not really what we’re wondering. What about as late in the season as we are now? Then the answer is a more predictable name: Paul Goldschmidt led all of MLB in batting average on August 18, 2015. Here’s the relevant Fangraphs leaderboard.

In fact, again looking from May 1 onwards in each season, only 2015 Paul Goldschmidt and 1999 Luis Gonzalez have ever led MLB in batting average. The latest date Gonzo led was June 5, 1999 — when he was hitting .390, the day after coming one hit short of batting .400. Again, it was a very different offensive environment, let’s say. As some of you might know, we have never had a full-season batting champion. 2015 Goldy would finish 4th, while 1999 Gonzo would finish 6th. The closest we’ve ever come was 2019 Ketel Marte, who finished 3rd, and never led.

Here are the others who led after only 1 or 2 games besides Mathis: 2000 Steve Finley, 2013 Gerardo Parra, and 2014 Goldschmidt (after just the Australia series; it helps that only two teams had played!). And here are the others who led later on in April: 2001 Jay Bell (April 18-19), 2007 Orlando Hudson (April 15 and 20), and 2011 Miguel Montero (April 8-10, 13-14). All told, that’s some pretty good company for Vargas. Is it sustainable? Almost certainly not, though even after this afternoon’s ohfer, Ildemaro still has a striking 47-point lead over the current runner-up, the Astros’ Yordan Alvarez.

Still, we’ll continue to enjoy it while it lasts. You can only appreciate the wonders of a game where, for more than a month an unheralded journeyman on his fifth stint with the Diamondbacks, was the best hitter in baseball.