Of major league history’s five longest hit streaks (that is, sequences of consecutive games with at least one hit), three have come with the hitter hitting zero homers through the entire streak.

The five longest hit streaks in the majors have been:
Joe DiMaggio (1941), 56 games, 15 homers
Willie Keeler (1896-97), 45 games, 0 home runs
Pete Rose (1978), 44 games, 0 homers
Bill Dahlen (1894), 42 games, 4 home runs
George Sisler (1922), 41 games, 0 home runs

More on homerless hit streaks after the jump.

Since the end of the Deadball Era, around 1920, the third-longest consecutive streak of games with at least one hit but no homers (that is, the longest other than those of Rose and Sisler) has been by Sam Rice, who had a 31-game homerless hit streak for the Senators in 1924.

The longest homerless hit streak in the “Expansion Era” (1961-2012), other than Pete’s famous streak, was by Ron LeFlore, the Tiger outfielder whose talent was originally discovered while he was in prison. LeFlore had a 29-game hit streak with no homers in 1976.

The two longest homerless hit streaks in the six-division era (1994-2012) have been a 26-game streak last season by Emilio Bonifacio (who was the Marlins’ everyday center fielder this year until he got hurt) and Joe McEwing’s 24-game streak in 1999 when he was with the Cardinals.

The three longest homerless hit streaks this season so far have all been by guys who were with the Mets last year: Jose Reyes had a streak from late May through early June of 15 games in a row of at least one hit but no homers, Angel Pagan had such a homerless hit streak of 14 games at just about the same time as Jose, and David Wright had a streak that ended last night of 14 games with at least one hit but no homers. Wright’s  full hit streak that ended last night had been 15 games, but he had homered in the first one of those games, so his homerless hit streak was 14 games.

The longest sequence of homerless games that DiMaggio had during his 56-game hit streak was a 9-game sequence from the third through the eleventh game of the streak. He hit only two homers over the first 22 games of the streak, but then hit eleven homers over the next 25 games, more of  a Babe Ruth than a Pete Rose pace. Over Rose’s 44-game streak in 1978, Charlie Hustle’s slash line was .385 BA/.421 OBP/.462 SLG/.883 OPS.  An .883 OPS is a good number but hardly great.  .883 over a full season would have been good for 11th in the majors in OPS among qualifiers that year.

The longest homerless hit streak of Joe DiMaggio’s career was 14 games, including his last 12 games of the 1940 season and the first two of the 1941 season, during which he would later produce that most famous hitting streak of all.