How many takes did the baseball bat scene in The Shining need?

How to get close to this number

Reason from the record rather than from filmmaking. A typical scene runs to a handful of takes and a difficult one to a few dozen; a number famous enough to hold a world record has to be an order of magnitude beyond that. Triple digits is what a record for a dialogue scene looks like.

The context in the explanation is the part that matters more than the number. The actress later described the shoot as one of the hardest experiences of her life, and the production is now a standard case study in what directors should not do. A record that was once cited as evidence of artistic rigour is now cited as evidence of something else.

That reframing is worth noticing as a general pattern. Behind-the-scenes anecdotes about extreme directorial demands were told admiringly for decades and are being retold critically now, with the same facts and the opposite conclusion. The number has not changed; what it is understood to demonstrate has.