In celebration of blog post #1500 (that’s this one), I give to you the much-anticipated list of sports-related numbers, 1-100.

Recently Mike Greenberg (the ESPN guy of Mike & Mike, Get Up, etc.) published a book called Got Your Number, in which Greenie takes the numbers 1-100 and gives a sports-themed association to each. Most of them are uniform numbers, as in, who is the greatest player to wear number X?

To me sports numbers are more about the stats and/or the years, though uniform numbers play a role as well. I’ve talked about this several times on Math and Musings and promised the full list. Well, here it is.

1–This is easy. One refers to #1 poll ranking. We’re number one. Nothing simpler than that.

2–Derek Jeter. Not only one of the greatest, but one of the coolest and classiest athletes in the history of sports.

3–Three strikes and you’re out. End of story. Literally.

4–Final Four. Just the sound of it is pure poetry. College basketball’s Final Four is the greatest weekend in sports.

5–Joe DiMaggio. The Yankee Clipper was Jeter before Jeter.

6–Bill Russell. When your uniform number is retired by the entire league… you own it.

7–Mickey Mantle. Such an icon and iconic number that George Costanza would name his first child Seven.

8–Alex Ovechkin. Perhaps a little D.C. bias here, but the Great Eight has overtaken Yogi, Cal, Troy Aikman, et al.

9–Nine innings. Might I point out there are also nine men on a baseball diamond.

10–Perfect 10. Even the movie with name implies perfection. But with apologies to Bo Derek, it’s Mary Lou Retton who owns the number 10.

11–Men on the field. Football, American or otherwise, has given us this odd offering of players. It’s now hard to imagine anything else.

12–Tom Brady. From Michigan to New England to Tampa Bay, he always played for “other” teams, so I never really rooted for Brady. But it’s hard to deny his place at the top of football lore. And among those who had a dozen on their backs.

13–Alex Rodriguez. Talk about a guy I used to hate. Everyone did, back when he wore 3 for the Seattle Mariners. He also wore 3 in Texas, but when he came to the South Bronx it was lucky 13. By the end of his career, somehow we were all rooting for him.

14–Tiger’s early major total. Tiger Woods had won 14 majors by the time he was 32. The record for career majors was (and is) 18; conservatively Woods was going to have at least 25. Well, it would be another 11 years before he won another (seeing him win the 2019 Masters was one of the highlights of my sports-viewing life), and it doesn’t look as though he’ll add to his 15 ever again. But those first 14 were magical. (Magical is going to be a theme on this list.)

15–First point in tennis. Somehow in this gentlemanly game when you get one point they give you 15. Talk about grade inflation.

16–Sweet Sixteen. With apologies to everyone who’s ever worn the number, nothing’s cooler than this simple total of schools left standing after the first weekend of March Madness.

17–Gibson’s K’s. Game 1 of the 1968 World Series. It was the year of the pitcher, and nobody did it better. Though the Detroit Tigers would win the series, they fanned 17 times against Bob Gibson that first afternoon.

18–Nicklaus majors. When Walter Hagen won the 1929 British Open it was his 11th major championship. Jack Nicklaus broke that record by winning the 1973 PGA Championship. He’d add half a dozen more, and fifty years later he still owns the record.

19–Black Sox. Two years after the infamous Chicago Black Sox threw the 1919 World Series there was an actual scandal involving the office of the president, cabinet members, and bribery on a national scale. The Teapot Dome Scandal was the Watergate of its day… but all people were talking about was a baseball game. That’s the power of sports.

20–Clemens’ K’s. On April 29, 1986, Roger Clemens struck out 20 Seattle Mariners, breaking a single game nine-inning record. A dozen years later he did it again, tying his own mark, still never eclipsed.

21–Clemente. No one’s been classier on the field, off the field, or posthumously, now more than 50 years after his death.

22–22-caliber rifle. I watch biathlons only once every four years, but when I think of a 22, a 22 is what I think of.

23–Michael Jordan. If you grew up in the 21st century you probably associate this number with a certain Mr. James, but if you’re my age or older, there’s only one 23. Personally I also think he owns the title of GOAT, and he also owns the number 23.

24–Ken Griffey Jr. Once again this one sort of depends on how old you are. An earlier generation probably has Willie Mays in this spot, but by the time I was watching Willie Mays he was eating corn wearing a blue bonnet. I started following baseball on Opening Day 1989. That was the debut game of the greatest player I ever saw. It was Ken Griffey Jr. And he wore number 24.

25–Top 25. No list defines college football or basketball better than the weekly poll known as the Top 25.

26–Marathon distance. Twenty-six miles, 385 yards. Story goes the extra 385 yards was so Queen Alexandra and company could better view the race during the 1908 Olympics in London. We round it off here.

27–’27 Yankees. They didn’t call ’em Murderers’ Row for nothin’. Six players, the manager, and the team president all made the Hall of Fame.

28–Phelps’ medals. Michael Phelps won 28 Olympic swimming medals, 23 of them gold. Second place is Mark Spitz. With 11.

29–Beamon’s jump. When Bob Beamon won the long jump competition at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City his winning leap flashed on the screen as 8.90 meters. It was some time and calculations before Americans realized Beamon had broken the record by nearly two feet. In 55 years it has been topped only one time.

30–ESPN’s 30 for 30. Nearly 15 years old and more than 150 specials in, ESPN’s 30 for 30 series has eclipsed anyone who’s ever put the number on his back.

31–Denny McLain. In 1968 Denny McLain won 31 games. If that weren’t enough, he also recorded an album that year for Capitol Records. I aspire.

32–Magic Johnson. There have been many greats to wear 32, but only one we call Magic.

33–Larry Bird. Like 32, 33 has been worn by many greats, including this fitting rival of our #32.

34–Walter Payton. I caught Payton only at the end of his career, more familiar with his “Many of the Year” award than his success on the gridiron, but perhaps that’s indeed what gives him his well-earned spot on this list.

35–Kevin Durant. But for a brief stint in Brooklyn, he’s owned 35 everywhere he’s gone.

36–Jesse Owens. One of those performances that went beyond sports, there will never be another moment like Jesse Owens at the 1936 Olympics.

37–Casey Stengel. Baseball’s the only game where the coach suits up just like the players. He’s called the manager, and few have managed better than Charles Dillon Stengel.

38–WSBK-TV. As a kid I just called it “The Boston Channel.” Actually that’s probably what most people called it. Before there was 24-hour-a-day wall-to-wall sports coverage on our TVs, computers, phones, and watches, there was WSBK-TV, Channel 38. Home to Bruins, Red Sox, and later Celtics games, “The Boston Channel” was ahead of its time.

39–Jimmy Connors. I don’t think I ever saw my dad more excited about anything than watching Jimmy Connors’ dream run at the 1991 U.S. Open at age 39. Connors made the semifinals playing against opponents half his age. He won the tournament five times, but none was more memorable than this Joe Hardy ride.

40–Jose Canseco. Say what you want about Jose Canseco, his 1988 season totals were as eye-popping as his home run blasts. Baseball’s first “40-40” man (42 home runs, 40 stolen bases), only three players have done it since.

41–We’ve been hearing it since 1941… no one has hit .400 in a season since 1941. The man was Ted Williams, and he owns #41.

42–Jackie Robinson. The number is literally retired by all of Major League Baseball. With apologies to Douglas Adams, 42 is not the answer to life, the universe, and everything. It’s Jackie Robinson’s uniform number.

43–Richard Petty. Yeah, it looked cool on Eckersley’s back, but nothing’s cooler than a number printed on the side of a racecar.

44–Hank Aaron. Many have worn it, but no one’s got the universal respect of baseball legend Hank Aaron. First in the alphabet, first on the home run list, first among 44s.

45–Jordan. Again. He wore it for only 22 games, but when Michael Jordan returned to the NBA… wearing a different number!… it went viral before going viral was a thing.

46–Nicklaus at the Masters. The record has since been broken, but when Jack Nicklaus won the 1986 Masters at age 46… it’s all we’ve ever thought about since when hearing the number 46.

47–Robinson. Again. Of all the monumental events in baseball history there have probably been none more talked about than that which occurred on April 15, 1947. Jackie Robinson steps on the field and baseball history is made.

48–Red Sox futility. Every 30 years the Boston Red Sox do something interesting. In 1918 they won it all with Babe Ruth. In 1978 they lost it to Bucky Dent. Halfway between? Classic Red Sox heartbreak, losing a one-game playoff against the Cleveland Indians in a one-game playoff to end the regular season.

49–49ers. Montana, Rice, cable cars, panning for gold. This one’s easy. Forty-nine? Forty-niners.

50–PGA Tour Champions age. They used to call it the Senior PGA Tour. Now, in this more enlightened era we call it by this more euphemistically polite moniker.

51–Giants-Dodgers playoff. They called it “the shot heard ’round the world,” Bobby Thompson’s walk-off home run to defeat the Brooklyn Dodgers and win the National League pennant. Back when baseball was king and New York City was the epicenter of it all, this was the moment that defined it.

52–Cards in a deck. Is card playing a sport? Doesn’t matter. This is what we associate with the number 52.

53–Yankees five in a row. Remember when I said that in the 1950s baseball was king and New York was its epicenter? The New York Yankees were the kings, and played at the epicenter. From 1949 to 1953 they won five straight World Series. Seventy years later and no one’s done it since.

54–Willie Mays catch. A ball entering a glove seems like a simple thing. But when it happens in the World Series, in amazing fashion by one of the greatest players of all time, people still talk about it nearly seven decades later.

55–Brooklyn Dodgers. Roger Kahn called them the Boys of Summer. Jackie, Pee Wee, Duke… they were finally going to bring a world championship to the much-wounded borough. In 1955 they did. It was the only World Series the Brooklyn Dodgers ever won.

56–DiMaggio’s hitting streak. It’s one of sport’s most unbreakable records and a magic number in a sport filled with magic numbers. How could 56 mean anything else?

57–Sputnik. Not specifically a “sports” number, but tangentially related. When the Soviets launched the Sputnik satellite it was true they took a lead in the space race. They had Sputnik, but we had Mickey Mantle.

58–Don Drysdale’s scoreless streak. This is the first in our series of records and broken records. Don Drysdale’s run of consecutive scoreless innings was a record that lasted for 20 years, until broken by another Dodger pitcher en route to a Cy Young season. Suddenly the number to memorize wasn’t 58 but…

59–Orel Hershiser’s scoreless streak. Hershiser had a pretty good year in 1988: consecutive scoreless innings record, All-Star nomination, LCS MVP, World Series MVP, Cy Young, Gold Glove, and World Series ring. Not a bad summer.

60–Babe Ruth. It’s been nearly a hundred years, and it’s been topped eight times, but Babe Ruth’s 60 home runs in 1927 is still the magical baseball statistic.

61–Roger Maris. Asterisk or no, Roger Maris’ number deserves a place on this list as well.

62–Aaron Judge. Third Yankee right fielder in a row. Aaron Judge’s 62 home runs in 2022 is proof that all records are made to be broken.

63–Jordan’s point total. It was April 20, 1986. Bulls-Celtics playoff game at Boston Garden. As though Michael Jordan needed further evidence of his emerging stardom. Before he won six championships himself he was dropping 63 points against the team that would win it all in ’86. Bulls lost the game, but they won six titles before the Celtics would win another.

64–NCAA tournament teams. From 1985 to 2000 (my heyday for watching sports) the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament (a.k.a. March Madness) had exactly 64 teams. Talk about a perfect bracket.

65–Play-in game. It started in 2001 with just the one “play-in” game. It eventually grew on me, and now I’m a big fan of what I usually call the “Dayton games.” Love the sneak peek early in the week.

66–Mario Lemieux. From a stats perspective, from a human perspective, from a team perspective, and from an individual perspective, Lemieux is one of the all-time greats. He won a Stanley Cup as a player and an owner, squeezing in an Olympic gold in between as well.

67–Carl Yastrzemski. The year Yaz won the Triple Crown and took the Red Sox to the World Series was one of the greatest individual performances in a team game of all time, regardless of sport.

68–The Year of the pitcher. Gibson, Drysdale, McLain, Lolich… 1968 was a pivotal year in American history, but in baseball it means only one thing: the year of the pitcher. They literally changed the rules after this one.

69–The New York Mets. You can’t talk about them without referring to them as Amazin’. That’s saying something.

70–Mark McGwire. Yes, the record was broken only three years later, and yes, we know McGwire was a steroid user too, but his final home run total in the incredible year of 1998 is one that deserves inclusion on this list.

71–Fight of the Century. Billed simply as The Fight of the Century, it lived up to its billing. On March 8, 1971, undefeated Joe Frazier and undefeated Muhammad Ali, the current and former heavyweight champs fought in Madison Square Garden. Frazier won to keep the title, though Ali would regain it three years later.

72–Undefeated Dolphins. More than half a century later the feat hasn’t been repeated: an NFL team going through the entire season undefeated. The ’72 Dolphins did just that.

73–Bonds. There’s no asterisk on this one; this is the record. Interestingly enough it was the only time Bonds hit more than 50 in a season, though he had totals in the 40s seven times.

74–Rumble in the Jungle. In addition to the Ali-Foreman fight on October 30, the cultural festival promoting the event known as Zaire 74 captured the world’s attention six weeks prior.

75–World Series. The Big Red Machine, Carlton Fisk, and further Red Sox anguish. The ’75 World Series remains the classic of Fall Classics nearly half a century later.

76–76ers. Wilt, Dr. J, cheesesteaks, and brotherly love. This one was easy.

77–Portland Trail Blazers. It’s the only championship they’ve ever won, in the first year of the real NBA, following the NBA-ABA merger. Led by Bill Walton and coached by the legendary Jack Ramsay, the team’s progress (this year and the few that followed) is discussed at length in David Halberstam’s The Breaks of the Game.

78–Bucky Dent. In his career he hit a total of 40 home runs. Few in baseball history have been bigger than the one Bucky Dent hit on October 2, 1978, as the Yankees defeated the Boston Red Sox in a one-game playoff.

79–Magic/Larry. This was their first showdown, as collegians competing in the finals of the 1979 NCAA Tournament. This is when the “madness” began, I suppose, and in the years that followed, their rivalry brought similar attention to the pros. For what it’s worth Magic won three of their four championship bouts.

80–Miracle on Ice. Called simply a miracle, the U.S. Olympic hockey team’s defeat of the Soviets in Lake Placid may have been more influential that Apollo 11 in our winning the Cold War.

81–Kobe. It was January 22, 2006, just another day in an otherwise unspectacular L.A. Lakers season. Given that it occurred in our current media-saturated culture in a major market (as opposed to Hershey, Pa.), Kobe’s 81 points in a single game was somehow more spectacular than Wilt’s 100 nearly a half century before.

82–Jordan. Again. Michael’s got at least a share of half a dozen numbers on this list, the earliest of which is this one. It was March 29, 1982, that college freshman Michael Jordan hit a game-winning jumper to win the University of North Carolina’s first championship under Dean Smith. From this moment forward, for more than 40 years now, he’s been one of the most famous athletes on the planet.

83–N.C. State. It wasn’t their first championship and it wasn’t necessarily the most famous Final Four, but North Carolina State’s magical run in the 1983 NCAA tournament brought inspiration to underdogs everywhere. Coach Jim Valvano was only 37 at the time. When he passed away 10 years later (also way too early) it made this championship that much more special.

84–Carl Lewis. He wasn’t competing in front of der Fuhrer, but Carl Lewis’ replication of Jesse Owens’ four Olympic gold medals half a century previously was just as compelling. In an era of great national exposure but just before money and steroid use tainted much of track and field, Lewis blew away the competition on the world’s biggest stage. Competing in front of the home crowd in Los Angeles made it that much sweeter.

85–Da Bears. You don’t have to be from Chicago or have ever seen a full episode of SNL to know the reference. The 1985 Chicago Bears were not only great on the field but Instagram worthy off it as well.

86–Mets. Again. This time nobody called them Amazin’; the nicknames and adjectives were probably a little more terse. Writer Jeff Pearlman called them simple “The Bad Guys.” Subtitle: brawling, boozing, bimbo-chasing. Most of these championship Mets wore that title proudly.

87–Rabbit ball. The stats speak for themselves, though compared to the later steroid era and 21st century reliance on the home run, 1987 offensive stats in Major League Baseball seem pedestrian. Whether planned or not (tighter seams?), in 1987 baseball power was big news.

88–Kirk Gibson. The thing about Kirk Gibson’s dramatic home run in Game One of the 1988 World Series is that Gibson is arguably the third most famous person in the story. It was the man on the mound (Dennis Eckersley) and the man on the mic (Vin Scully) who were more celebrated. But for one pitch it was all Gibson, setting up a Dodgers World Series victory.

89–Earthquake. It was the first World Series I was going to sit down to watch. I did for two games, then waited with the rest of the world as emergency crews dealt with the fallout from the Loma Prieta earthquake.

90–Feet between bases. Even now with bigger bags, the 90 feet thing is still the same. Has been since before the Civil War.

91–Rodman. Rodman was great in the ’80s for the Pistons, but he wasn’t really Rodman until he started wearing 91 (among other articles of clothing) for the Bulls in 1995.

92–Dream Team. Michael, Magic, Larry, Stockton, Malone. You could have combined the rosters of every other nation in the world and spotted them 20 points a game. The aptly-named Dream Team still would have won Olympic gold in Barcelona.

93–Chicago Bulls. They probably wouldn’t have beaten the Dream Team, but they did beat every other team in the NBA… three years in a row. Only the retirement of Michael Jordan slowed this train.

94–Baseball strike. Not only was I in the prime of my baseball-viewing life, my team (the New York Yankees) were actually getting good in the summer of 1994 when players chose to strike, cancelling the rest of the season and the World Series.

95–Ripken. Only the grace and dignity of Cal Ripken Jr. could bring back the sport from its dark days of a strike the previous year. Playing in his 2,131st consecutive game, the Iron Man made history September 6, 1995.

96–Yankees. Redemption for the ’94 World Series cancellation I suppose. The Yankees won it all in 1996 for the first time since ’78. More importantly, the first time in my lifetime.

97–Tiger’s Masters. Truly a win for the ages, Tiger Woods’ first major championship was an early high in a lifetime of highs and lows for arguably the greatest golfer of all time.

98–McGwire/Sosa. It’s now tainted because of steroid use, but in the summer of ’98 all we were thinking was wow. Just wow.

99–Gretzky. Like 6 in the NBA and 42 in MLB, 99 is retired throughout the NHL to honor the man known simply as “The Great One.”

100–Wilt. This was the most obvious number on the list. If you don’t see why, please go back to the beginning and read it again.