Apparently there's a bit of a kerfuffle this week in that section of the baseball audience where earnest students of all ages are always trying to make art into science.

The catalyst was Ryan Zimmerman's 30-game hitting streak, which burbled unsuccessfully for attention in Washington, D.C., as that city built feverishly toward a Game 7 between its Capitals and the Penguins. When the Capitals ended that series with a spectacular pie-in-the-face loss and the populace turned in dejection to see how Zimmerman was doing, his streak was over.

So that was it, 30 games, which was worth noting but still fell well short of the wake-me-at-40 threshold that is my personal standard, not to mention the record of 56 set by Joe DiMaggio in 1941. Zimmerman's essential comment was that the streak served, if nothing else, to demonstrate the difference between 30 and 56, and somehow that resonated with the game's historians, even though scientists have long since estimated the difference confidently at 26 games.

Anyway, here's the statistical issue.

According to Chris Gorski of the Inside Science News Service, there have been a lot more of these fairly sizeable hitting streaks throughout baseball history than there ought to have been based on statistical models.

I know, harumph!

Gorski cited the work of baseball historian Trent McCotter, who published an article in the 2008 Baseball Research Journal.

"Mathematicians," Gorski wrote, "usually compute the chances of a hitting streak by multiplying a player's chance of getting a hit in any given game, about 76 percent for a .300 hitter, by itself repeatedly. McCotter examined the real historical record of hitting streaks. Then, he took each individual season of every player from 1957 to 2006 and pulled out all the games where players did not record at bats. He used a computer to reorder the remaining games 10,000 times and calculated the average number of streaks."

I know, why would someone do that?

But since McCotter counted many more streaks than could have been predicted, the scientists are left to speculate that hitters change their behavior during these streaks, or that pitchers pitch them differently, or that fielders field them differently, and even that official scorers score them differently officially.

All of those things might be true to varying extents, but I suspect it has more to do with something Pete Rose said many, many times (more than he should have by any statistical model) both before and after he set the modern National League record by hitting in 44 consecutive game in 1978.

"Baseball," said Rose, who understood it more as thoroughly as anyone I've ever met, "is a funny game."

Hitting streaks, even 30-gamers, such as Zimmerman's, are essentially freak shows.

When you consider that, in any one game, you can go 4 for 4 without hitting the ball past the pitcher's mound and that four screaming liners to the warning track can leave you hitless, the number of variables that have to line up for anyone to hit in even 10 games in a row are rather daunting.

That's why, over the years, my reaction to press-box announcements that, with that single, so-and-so has a 12-game hitting streak, has never been, "Gee, I wonder if I still have DiMaggio's phone number?"

Somewhere short of 56, these things are going to end.

Gorski further cited the work of Steven Strogatz, professor of applied mathematics at Cornell, who has calculated that a hitting streak of more than 55 games should happen once every 500 years. That's not to say it won't happen this summer (Andy LaRoche?), only that it might not happen until the year 2441. If you're around then, get your tickets early.

There is almost certainly some validity in this theory of the changing nature of players and people around the game on those rare occasions when streaks become phenomena. The main symptom: people lose their minds.

Gene Garber, for example, who struck out Rose to end his 44-game the night of Aug. 1, 1978, leaped off the mound in celebration. The Braves had won, 16-4. For his part, Rose was actually zanier.

"Most pitchers with a 16-4 lead just challenge you," Pete complained. "They ain't out there inning-and-outing you, upping-and-downing you like it's the seventh game of the World Series."

Thus the most memorable moment of the whole streak was Rose, who played every minute of every game like it was the seventh game of the World Series, sitting there complaining that someone else would have the nerve to play the game exactly the way he did.

Have I mentioned it's a funny game?