[Topnotchsy]

I decided to try and take a little closer and more "technical" look at the question:

Bonds hit 73 home runs. The highest home run total in a single season since 2010 was 54, or 74%

Cobb's career average was .366. The highest current total is .318 shared by Jose Altuve and Miguel Cabrera. While .318 is roughly 87% of .366, no one would say that current hitters are hitting 87% as high as Cobb. If we drop the first digit and compare .018 and .066, they are 27% of the way to Cobb.

Walter Johnson had 110 shutouts. The current active leader is Clayton Kershaw with 15, or 14% of the total.

Joe DiMiggio had a 56 game hitting streak. The longest streak since 2010 was Dan Uggla at 33 games, or 59%.

Cal Ripken played 2632 conecutive games. The longest active streak is Alcides Escobar with 286. He's just 11% of the way.

Rose had 4256 hits, while Adrian Beltre, the active leader has 3019, making his 71% of the way to Rose.

Ryan had 5714 K's. CC Sabathia has 2806, good for 49% of the total.

Cy Young had 511 wins. Bartolo Colon has 237, good for 46%.

And the longest win streak ever is 26 (with a tie in there). This season there were 2 streaks of 11 games, for 42%.

Looking through this list there were a couple of things that I noticed:

1) Playing consecutive games is simply not something that is focused on anymore, and the reason is simple. It is the only thing on this list that could easily be argued is not a positive stat. While not getting injured is great, there are almost definitely diminished returns from playing every single game season after season. It was hard to even find out the player who is leading this category and it proved to have the lowest percentage (albeit in a discussion where the percentages mean different things in different cases). I can imagine a player who prides himself on playing every day combined with the right type of manager could mean that we see longer streaks over the years than we are seeing now and though Ripken's mark will be a tall task, if someone played 1,000 games straight, it could become the kind of streak that people push for, and so the player gets put out there every game, even if a break might have been a better idea.

2) Many people view Cy Young's win total as the hardest to ever pass. But it was not that long ago that Maddux and Clemens each had 350+ wins, good for 70% of Cy Young's totals. With the way rotations are structured it would seem almost unimaginable for someone to approach 511, but I think there are other records that are much tougher.

3) Not only do I not think that Ryan's record is the hardest, I think in an era with such huge increases in strikeouts, we may see it broken sooner than people think. Consider the seasons when the top 4 in career strikeouts retired: 1993 (Ryan), 2009 (Johnson), 2007 (Clemens), 1988 (Carlton). While we have moved away from other stats, K's are more recent records.

4) While ultimately the lowest percentage was tied to active games, I felt that the shutout streak would be the hardest to approach. The active leader Clayton Kershaw is only 14% of the way there, and the highest pitcher on the list who did not pitch in the deadball era is Warren Spahn, whose 63 shutouts is still only 57% of Johnson's total. (On a separate note, it would be crazy to consider what Spahn's career numbers would have been had he not missed 3 seasons to the military.) Career shutouts are a function of games pitched, complete games and a league where few runs are scored. Today's league is none of those. This can be illustrated by the fact that Kershaw's career ERA+ (ERA compared to the league is 162, which is 15 points higher than than Johnson's, and is by far the best for any starting pitcher (although to be fair, retired pitchers have the back end of their career included and Kershaw is still currently in his prime.)

There are a number of records that won't be broken, but I think that Johnson's shutout record is just about the safest of the group.