As of this afternoon, Chipper Jones was hitting .417. He is currently the only player with a batting average over .400 for the year. Can he hold on and finish the year over .400? And will we ever see another player like Tony Gwynn who seemed to threaten .400 every year?
I don’t think he’ll make it (but I’d love it if he did), but I think someday will see another hitter like Gwynn. Maybe Ichiro’s got it in him as his career winds down.
I would wager large sums of money that Chipper Jones will not hit .400 or better this season. However, I won’t rule out the possibility of it happening again at some point. Some things will probably need to change for it to happen. Specifically, pitching philosophies. With all of the specialized relievers now it very difficult to sustain long streaks of multi-hit and/or multi-walk games. On the other hand, expansion has thinned the pitching talent quite a bit, and the overall lack of enthusiasm for baseball among youngsters will also continue to cause a talent drop. All of this is my opinion of course.
I think we’ll see another one and it’ll be awesome. I’d really like to see Chipper Jones do it but there’s so much season ahead of him. As a Blue Jays fan I was rooting for Olerud the year he hit .363, he really tapered off the last month or so.
I think we will eventually see another .400 hitter. I will not predict who or when. It will take six great months to do it though. It will help if they play in a hitters park like Fenway or Camden Yards in fact.
George Brett was someone that I thought could do it and he missed out.
I doubt Chipper at his age can sustain a .400 campaign, it would be fun if he makes a go at it though.
Jim
Take a look at the other baseball records that were thought to be unassailable.
Ruth’s single season and career home run totals.
Cobb’s career base hits.
Gehrig’s consecutive game streak.
If I were a bettor, I’d wager we’ll see another .400 hitter before we see another pitcher win 30 games in a season.
That’s probably a reasonable bet, although you never know.
We COULD see another .400 hitter. It’ll take someone having a great season and getting some lucky breaks. No reason it can’t happen.
I agree with RickJay.
Whenever you think major league numbers are insurmountable, in a decade or two along comes an exception to the rule.
Gretzky is the exception. I bow to the mighty Wayne.
Unfair comparison, as Gretzky is nno ordinary mortal. The accomplishments of men cannot be fairly compared to Gods who choose to walk among us in the guise of men.
I’d like to see it happen at least once during my lifetime. Still, it is quite a feat since no one’s done it since 1941. (All the more reason why I still gnash my teeth whenever the 1994 season is mentioned.)
I don’t see Chipper Jones as a likely candidate to do it. I think of players who are presently at or near their peak, the likely candidates are Ichiro (as previously stated) and Albert Pujols.
…Which makes Howe’s achievements with such an amazing talent pool that much robust.
I’m not knocking Gretzky, but Gordie only had 6 teams vying for all the talent.
To answer the question: yeah. We’ll see another one. It won’t be Chipper Jones, though.
I predict we will, and there will be a drug scandal involved.
But aren’t they mainly for strength as opposed to timing and accuracy? It’s the latter two factors that are more important for someone trying to hit .400.
There will be some other drug that improves reaction time or vision.
I don’t see it happening with Pujols, because pitchers are afraid to throw strikes to him. (Which may be an obstacle with other hitters who might otherwise have a shot at .400; it’s just that Pujols is the one I’ve been paying most attention to.)
The long term trends are against it. I believe Stephen Jay Gould outlined the reasons. My summary from memory, and my own observations:
The gap between the best and the worst hitters is much less than it used to be. In Cobb’s day, when he was winning all those batting titles, he would routinely outhit many of his teammates by 150 points or more. Nobody, even Ichiro, does that anymore.
Strikeouts are up, way up, over what they were in Cobb’s/Teddy’s day. They actually trended downward in the lively ball 20’s, to about half of today’s rate, but then slowly started going up. Each extra K is a lost opportunity for a ball in play to drop in.
Defenses IMHO are the biggest deal-breaker here. Yes you can have a Tony Gwynn with his strikeout numbers in the teens each year, but he still has to contend with bigger gloves, better-maintained fields, and faster athletes (overall).
Despite all that, we’ve had 3-4 guys make a run at .400 over the last 30 years, coming within 6-12 points (and I believe that both Boggs and Ichiro hit .400 over a 365 day period across two seasons). The above factors are just enough to have kept any of them from crossing the magic number.
They were afraid to throw strikes to Ted Williams, too. Barry Bonds hit .370 a few years ago and we all know how scared pitchers were of him.
Being a feared hitter is not an obvious disadvantage to compiling high batting averages, or else the only hitters with high batting averages would be slap singles hitters.
Ted Williams was a dead pull hitter. they used the Ted Williams shift. Everybody was on the right side but the left fielder and 3rd baseman. He still hit right into it . Lifetime average 344.
It will happen again.There are freak years. Norm Cash a lifetime 278 hitter hit 361 . If a real good hitter gets lucky it could happen.
Will we ever see another .400 hitter in MLB?
Forever’s a long time, and the game can change in unpredictable ways.
For instance, the change from 4-man to 5-man pitching rotations, which happened for no apparent reason ca. 1980, has pretty much killed the prospect of a 30-game winner until things change again.
The reliance on closers and set-up men, to the point where starters are frequently pulled after 7-8 innings while working on a shutout, has greatly reduced complete-game shutouts, which were a staple pitching stat when I was younger.
Who knows what the game will look like in 2108? .400 hitters could be common at some point between now and then.
What I would bet is that we won’t see a .400 hitter over the next 25 seasons. It’s a hard thing, to sustain that sort of average over a full season.
Looking at the list of league batting champs, my thought is that if I were The God of MLB, and wanted to make a .400 hitter happen, I’d regularly have the Rockies trade for young, high-average line-drive hitters. If Nomar Garciaparra had been in Colorado instead of Fenway in 1999-2000, he’d have had a shot. Not that he’s the only one, but that’s the sort of guy you’d be after: someone who’s already got a high BA by smacking a lot of line drives to the outfield, and who’d have more room for more line drives to drop in in CO.
Some among us still think those records are unbroken.
</tongue only partly in cheek>
Problem with Mr. Maris and Mr. Aaron?