re: IYO, who had the greatest peak in sports history?

The question really should be 'other than Gretzky'-- its that dominant a performance.

People look at his numbers and think 'Gee, that's a lot of points'-- and mentally they're comparing him to the peak scoring era of the NHL.

His 205, 208, and 215 consecutive seasons weren't just 'very good'- a third of the league's *teams* scored under 300 goals in the first year; the second, 9 of the 20 other teams were under 300 team goals; the last year, 7 of the 20 other teams were at 300 team goals or less, and Gretzky was within 51 points of having more points than the entire Red Wings franchise had goals in a season.

Its hard to translate that to other sports, but there's some ways to look at it that are interesting -- to put that in baseball terms, the worst scoring team in MLB history scored 372 runs-- for a single baseball player to account for a similar 80% level of runs created, they'd need to account for 298 runs.

While Bill James' formula for runs created is imperfect, Ruth's 1921 season total of 241 is the baseball record.

The best season by the best baseball player, compared to the worst scoring team in the history of baseball-- and it still doesn't compare to what Gretzky did to normal levels of NHL performance.