Baseball

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By Jim Nettleton

Major League Baseball last had a player hit .400 for a season in 1941. Of course, he was The Splendid Splinter, Teddy Ballgame – the great Ted Williams of the Boston Red Sox. At the time of this writing, it’s been sixty-seven years since that feat was accomplished and although some have come close, including Williams himself, no one has reached that lofty pinnacle since.

When you consider the history of the game and the number of players who have hit .400, you begin to realize just how difficult a feat it is. Consider, for example, that the .400 level has been reached just a total of thirty-five times from 1887 to today. And those achievements were not produced by thirty-five different players. Rogers Hornsby did it three times, as did Ty Cobb and Ed Delahanty. George Sisler accomplished it twice.

That means that only twenty-four different players have reached the .400 plateau in the one hundred and twenty-one years since 1887. Significantly, the game changed in enormous ways after the turn of the twentieth century and again after 1920. The .400 mark was reached twenty-two times before 1900 and only thirteen times all told since. Further, it was reached three times between 1900 and 1920, leaving only ten instances in baseball’s so-called Modern Era.

We also have to remember that during a portion of the 1800’s, a walk was considered a hit, a fact that greatly influenced the higher batting averages of the time. Of course, prior to the appearance of Babe Ruth, baseball was more of a “hit ‘em where they ain’t” game, in the immortal words of Wee Willie Keeler. When Ruth ushered in the power era, the ‘slap’ style of hitting began to take a backseat and overall batting averages tended downward.

Before Ted Williams hit .406 in 1941, the most recent player to hit .400 had been Bill Terry, who reached that mark in 1930, eleven years before Williams. Now, it has been sixty-seven years since Williams, by leaps and bounds the longest elapsed time between .400 hitters in baseball history.

So we can legitimately ask, will it ever happen again? As the game stands today, odds are very definitely against it. With hitters today facing pitching specialists in the middle to late innings and lights out closers, hitting for that high an average becomes ever more difficult. Not very many players play every game in a season anymore as well, and many teams platoon much more often than they used to, cutting into playing time even more.

Today, hitting approaches are much different than in the years when .400 averages popped up relatively regularly. The big contracts are awarded on run production, and hitting home runs is the quickest way to produce those runs. Hitters that specialize in the Wee Willie Keeler style are becoming more rare by the day, although there are still a few around, such as Juan Pierre. But the overwhelming tendency is to ‘back leg it’ as it’s referred to, and try to power the ball into the next municipality.

So my prediction is no – there won’t be another .400 hitter. Baseball has most likely seen the last of a highly elite breed.

Jim Nettleton is a radio and TV professional who is a lifelong baseball addict and who played the game for decades. He highly recommends a proven training aid designed to vastly increase hitting prowess, Rotational Hitting - http://tinyurl.com/69e7ce and a training aid to develop a psychological advantage in the game http://tinyurl.com/6zxqcx.

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By Jim Nettleton

Is anyone else as tired as I am of hearing endlessly about pitch counts in major league baseball? Today’s multi-millionaire pitchers are apparently so fragile that throwing anything over 100 pitches is considered an act worthy of a Congressional Medal.

These players are supposed to be the most well conditioned, most well trained in history, yet they cannot equal the pitching performances of countless players that have gone before, in the days when conditioning meant having only 4 hot dogs instead of eight and two fewer beers than the day before.

Never before have we seen such constant injuries, tendonitis attacks, and aggravated hang nail epidemics. Today’s pitchers do not remotely possess the sustainability of their predecessors. We can’t, I suppose, place all the blame at the feet of the pitchers. It is management that has, in its ultimate wisdom, decided that these tender players need to be completely coddled, lest they become irked and moody.

Okay, let’s do some constructive comparisons between today’s pitchers and those of days gone by. Today, 100 pitches is the panic point and complete games are almost unheard of. In days gone by, nothing could have been more the opposite. Let’s take Hall Of Famer Robin Roberts, for example. Roberts, in a career that spanned nineteen years, pitched 676 games. Of those, 305 were complete games, nearly half of all games he pitched. Every season, Roberts was present and accounted for, without those arm problems that modern day pitchers seem to develop as regularly as summer rains.

Nolan Ryan’s career covered 27 incredible years. He pitched in 807 games and, of those, 222 were complete games. Need we point out that he participated fully in all of those 27 years?

Steve Carlton’s career spanned 24 years, during which he pitched 741 games. Of those, 254 were complete games. There was no significant down time during those years, just continual top-level performance.

The 21 year career of Warren Spahn is another example. He pitched 750 games during that career and completed 382. That is truly an amazing total. And again, during all those games there was never significant down time.

These are just a few examples, but there are many, many others throughout baseball history. Why is it that pitchers of yesteryear had the stamina and ability to perform at a far higher career-long level than those of today? They had none of the training and conditioning advantages that today’s players enjoy, yet they were more durable and consistent than the vast majority of today’s pitchers.

It seems that sometimes the more we learn, the less we know. Nearly every team in the major leagues these days has pitchers on the disabled list, pitchers slated for Tommy John surgery, pitchers with sore elbows, shoulders, and on and on. It seems as though the baseball upper echelon, on both the league level and the individual team level, is thoroughly mishandling the situation. There has to be a reason that today’s pitchers can’t stand up under the durability spotlight when compared to those that came before. Pitchers of the past sometimes threw both ends of a double header, or pitched on consecutive days, or on only two days rest. Today, five days is the norm and pitchers simply aren’t available on any less rest.

Perhaps today’s practice of throwing less leads to weaker arms, not more durable arms. Doesn’t more repetition build more lasting strength? Yesterday’s pitchers threw much more often and maybe that’s the reason that they didn’t break down like a cheap watch.

Something is rotten in Denmark. Baseball needs to find the answer to this perplexing durability problem, because at today’s ridiculously inflated salary levels, fans deserve more than over coddled, under achieving pitchers.

About the author:

Jim Nettleton is a radio and TV professional who is a lifelong baseball addict and who played the game for decades. He highly recommends a proven training aid designed to vastly increase hitting prowess, Rotational Hitting - http://tinyurl.com/69e7ce and a training aid to develop a psychological advantage in the game http://tinyurl.com/6zxqcx.

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