How to Hit .400

The last man to make batting average magic.

There is a magic to the number. It is nice and round, a multiple of 100, which itself may have a claim as the roundest of the round. It is a perfect square. And it is sufficiently high to seem unattainable. No player has had a batting average of 400 points—that’s 400 tenths of a percent, or, if you speak baseball, simply .400 with a silent decimal point—over the course of an entire season since Ted Williams did it at age 23 in 1941. Every year or two, someone carries an average in the .390s into July, and we spend the next couple of months discussing whether the magic number is in reach. They never make it.

In 1986, biologist Stephen Jay Gould published a seminal article about .400 hitting that explains its disappearance as the inevitable result of the maturation of baseball play. As the average performances for batter, pitcher, and fielder move closer to their natural upper limits, he argues, the highs and lows tighten around the mean. Standard deviation declines over time. In his words:

Variation in batting averages must decrease as improving play eliminates the rough edges that great players could exploit, and as average performance moves toward the limits of human possibility. … Declining variation arises as a general property of systems that stabilize and improve while maintaining constant rules of performance through time. The extinction of .400 hitting is, paradoxically, a mark of increasingly better play. (Stephen Jay Gould, “Entropic Homogeneity Isn’t Why No One Hits .400 Any More,” Discover, August 1986.)

It is now a quarter century later, nobody has hit .400, and, presumably, the extremes have tightened still further around the average. That average has not changed, with the AL and NL hitting a combined .262 in 2009, almost exactly the historical average. We still have .400 chases—this past season Joe Mauer had a .392 average on July 1, and Chipper Jones’s average on July 1 was .393 the previous year. But those chases inevitably end with averages slowly sagging to more common levels, with Mauer finishing 2009 at .365 and Jones wrapping up 2008 with a .364 average. Can it be true that we will never again see a .400 hitter? Is it time to stop wasting ink every summer on whether the latest hot-handed player can make it to the mark?

Jack Cust, master of the three true outcomes.

To answer that question, and the question of who might do it, I will look at the anatomy of the theoretical modern .400 hitter. Joe Posnanski took this on early last season. His inspiration came while watching Jack Cust, a man who strikes out at an astonishing rate and who, among above average hitters, is possibly the least likely to hit .400. Posnanski compares past .400 hitters with great hitters of the present. The big difference, he finds, is that players struck out far less in the past. If current players could keep everything else equal and simply strike out less, he argues, we would see a .400 hitter again.

The key to this observation lies in Batting Average on Balls in Play, or BABIP. A player’s BABIP is his average on balls hit into the field of play, which includes every at bat that does not end in a home run or a strikeout. We calculate BABIP by subtracting home runs from hits, and dividing by at bats minus home runs and strikeouts. Some calculations, such as those at Wikipedia and The Hardball Times, add sacrifice flies to the denominator. It is also possible to add bases reached on error to the numerator. However, the simplest formula omits both of these factors. We will use this simple definition, which makes sense here, because sacrifice flies are omitted from batting average, and errors already count against it—if we assume official scorers are competent, errors would be outs if repeated.

Overall, balls in play turn into hits somewhere around 30 percent of the time. Batters seem to have some control over this, with good batters often able to hit .330 or higher on their balls in play. There is an enormous amount of variation. A player’s best and worst BABIP seasons may be as many as 50 to 60 points away from his career average.

Hall of Famer Rod Carew.

Over the past 50 years, in seasons of at least 502 plate appearances (the number needed to qualify for the batting title) the highest BABIP marks have been .411, by Rod Carew in 1977; .408, by Manny Ramirez in 2000; .406, by Jose Hernandez in 2002; and .405, by Andres Galarraga in 1993 and Roberto Clemente in 1967. Ichiro Suzuki, Derek Jeter, and David Wright are the only others to have reached a .400 BABIP. Thus, in 50 years, a batter has had at least a .400 BABIP while qualifying for the batting title only eight times. I looked at players with high career BABIPs and at least 1,800 plate appearances, or about 3 seasons worth of playing time—players who might be within striking distance of .400 on their balls in play—and noticed one common characteristic.

With a couple of exceptions, these high BABIP guys strike out a lot. As Posnanski writes, if they could strike out less, there is a good chance someone might get lucky on all of those balls in play and reach a .400 overall batting average. But saying “if he just struck out less he would hit .400″ is kind of like saying “if Jason Kendall just hit more home runs he would be a good batter.” A batter’s strikeout rate is an integral part of his hitting skill set; a player may have no more control over his strikeout rate than he does over his capacity for power. When players do consciously try to cut back their strikeouts, the results are not encouraging. Jack Cust, a natural strikeout artist who provides value with his power and on-base skills, tried to reduce his strikeouts in 2009. Both his power and his walks suffered.

Ichiro, posing for the pre-at bat snapshot.

Ichiro and Mauer are the two exceptions to the strikeout-happy norm of the career BABIP leaders. It makes sense that they would have a very good chance at .400, because when trying to hit for a high average, strikeouts are bad. It helps to have less of them. A strikeout counts as an at bat, thus factoring into batting average, but it is an automatic out. However, a strikeout is not the only type of at bat that does not end up in play. Home runs also do not factor into BABIP, and home runs are always hits. Just as a player cannot be lucky and get a hit on a strikeout, he also cannot be unlucky and not get a hit on a home run. Luck is for balls in play only.

So strikeouts are bad, but how bad are they? How do we quantify that? We cannot know until we look at the other rate that factors into batting average, a rate I will call BABnIP, for Batting Average on Balls not in Play. Again, two types of at bats do not factor into BABIP: home runs and strikeouts. To determine a player’s BABnIP, we will simply divide home runs, the hits, by home runs plus strikeouts, all balls not in play.

To find a player who has what it takes to hit .400, we need to look for someone who has a sufficiently high BABnIP that he could get there with reasonable luck on balls in play. That is, a player who not only does not strike out much, but who also hits for power. Here is a list of the highest single-season BABnIPs by currently active players from the past 10 seasons, with the BABIP the player would have needed to reach a .400 overall batting average.

Joe Mauer and Ichiro Suzuki do not make the list. This past season, Mauer would have needed a .419 BABIP to reach .400. If he keeps the power from his recent surge, he could get closer in the coming years. The closest Ichiro has ever been was in 2001, when he would have needed a .426 BABIP for .400. His career BABIP is a little higher than Mauer’s; if he got very lucky over a short season and beat that career mark by 60 points, he might have a chance. Sheffield, Helton, and Guerrero all have had good BABnIP seasons, but they all came in the first half of the decade, and all three are aging quickly.

The answer, as always, is “Albert Pujols.”

Two other sluggers, Aramis Ramirez and Carlos Lee, just missed the cut for Table 2. Both have had strong BABnIP seasons. However, both suffer from .295 career BABIP marks, which effectively puts a .400 BABIP season out of reach. Bonds, whom I left out because it seems unlikely he will play again, had great BABnIP seasons toward the end of his career. In 2004, he hit 45 home runs against only 41 strikeouts. But he also did not have a good career BABIP mark, hitting only .288 on his balls in play.

Albert Pujols is the player who consistently puts himself in strong position with his many home runs and few strikeouts. His career BABIP is .321, not nearly as good as the players in Table 1, but within striking distance given the BABnIP numbers he routinely puts up. Will Pujols ever hit .400? Probably not. But if he maintains his outstanding power and contact skills, one of these years he will get lucky on his balls in play and will make a serious run at the mark.