Seemingly it would be safe to assume that the winner of a baseball game has always been the team that scored the most runs at the end of nine innings; but actually the 1857 season was the first in which a game was required to go nine innings, with five innings constituting an official contest if play were stopped for some reason.

His streak was thereby preserved, never to be seriously jeopardized again until early in the 1939 season when he began showing advanced symptoms of the neuromuscular disease that would soon claim his life.