The most statistically dominant career performance in any major sport on Earth was not Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, or Wayne Gretzky — it was an Australian cricketer named Don Bradman, who retired in 1948 with a career batting average that places him roughly six standard deviations above the mean of test cricket history

The most statistically dominant career performance in any major sport on Earth was not Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, or Wayne Gretzky — it was an Australian cricketer named Don Bradman, who retired in 1948 with a career batting average that places him roughly six standard deviations above the mean of test cricket history

Imagine a basketball player who averaged not 30 points per game, like Michael Jordan, but 95 — for an entire career. Imagine a golfer who didn’t win 15 majors, like Tiger Woods, but 50. Imagine a hockey player who didn’t accumulate 2,857 career points, like Wayne Gretzky, but eight or nine thousand. This is the order of magnitude required to construct a hypothetical Bradman-equivalent in any other sport, and no athlete in the recorded history of…