The Quest for .400 batting - Will It Happen before I Die?

    Maybe not, the short and sweet. This is an achievement that perhaps has become harder with time. The last time it happened, there were no Blacks and effectively no Asians in the sport.

    The Triple Crown, similarly, was an elusive feat, until Miguel Cabrera did it with the Tigers in 2012. For those who do not know, that is being tops in the major leagues in batting, home runs, and RBIs. (Runs batted in). He batted excellently that year, as have so many batting champions before and since.

    But hitting .400? Not since Ted Williams from before World War II. That is like when my dad was three and my mom was being born. I think this was with the Red Sox, so they were not too far away. But in 2024, my dad is almost 87 and my mom has been gone for ten years.

    One guy flirted with hitting .400 when I was a kid, and my friend's older brother was freaking out around 1979, maybe 1980. George Brett! Are you kidding me? .390 or so in July? Wow! Brian Murray got my attention, and the magazine Boys Life, which I got as a kid because of Boy Scouting, or Cub Scouting, the authors touted and venerated baseball greats! Huh. Literature about a sports.

    Huh. Later I saw that Hemingway wrote about sports and sporting things.

    That is all right. Even baseball. A. Bartlett Giamatti, a poet laureate, loved baseball.

    So, we have to care about this sport in life, in art, in the scheme of things, right?

    .400 is a thing.

    In 1994, a bittersweet magical season, Tony Gwynn was coming up close to .400 when the season was ended with the money-grubbing strike. Curse them all, owners and players.

    So, now Luis Arraez has me excited 30 years later.

    Still a fan, a mere boy in the scheme of things.

    I hope that he does it. Make Ted Williams a thing again.