Williams Breaks .

Williams Breaks .400. In 1941 baseball player Ted Williams achieved one of the most sought-after goals in baseball: a batting average in excess of .400, or an average of more than 4 hits for every 10 turns at bat. . Williams Breaks .400 With three games left in the 1941 major league baseball season, Boston Red Sox outfielder Ted Williams's batting average stood at .401. He had the batting title in hand, and his team was out of the pennant race. Manager Joe Cronin asked Williams whether he wanted to sit out the remainder of the schedule to ensure that he stayed above the .400 mark, a full-season average that few hitters had reached. Williams refused, choosing to meet destiny at the plate, not in the dugout. "I want to hit over .400," he said, according to Sports Illustrated. "But I'm going to play three games here even if I don't hit a ball out of the infield. The record's no good unless it's made in all the games." Williams possessed exceptional abilities as a hitter. At 6 ft 3 in (2.6 m) and 205 lbs (93 kg) he was big enough to hit the ball hard. He had tremendous bat speed. His eyesight, once measured with 20-10 vision, was remarkable. Above all, Williams was obsessed with hitting. He practiced endlessly, swinging the bat in front of a mirror and spending hours at batting practice. "Hitting was my whole life," he told The Sporting News after retiring. Williams's 1941 season had had an inauspicious start. During spring training he chipped a bone in his ankle and spent most of the first month of the season in and out of the lineup. Beginning in mid-May, however, Williams found his groove. From May 15 he hit safely in 23 consecutive games, propelling his batting average to .430. Surprisingly, Williams's sensational average in 1941 wasn't the biggest topic in baseball. The mark that everyone followed was the hitting streak of Joe DiMaggio of the New York Yankees. Also on May 15, DiMaggio began his legendary 56-game hitting streak, the longest in baseball history. DiMaggio's day-to-day progress was followed intently by the fans and the media. Williams himself often relayed news from the scoreboard operator at Fenway Park in Boston to Red Sox center fielder Dom DiMaggio, Joe DiMaggio's brother. Williams's batting average peaked at .438 in June and stood at .414 in mid-August. By then DiMaggio's streak had ended and fans switched their attention to Williams's quest for .400. A batting average of .400 represents a special plateau in baseball. Prior to Williams, the .400 mark had been reached 12 times since 1900. From 1900 to 1920 it was topped four times. Ty Cobb topped it twice (.420 in 1911 and .409 in 1912). Joe Jackson (.408 in 1911) and Nap Lajoie (.426 in 1901) topped it as well. In the 1920s Rogers Hornsby broke the .400 barrier three times (.424 in 1924, .403 in 1925, and .401 in 1922), George Sisler broke it twice (.420 in 1922 and .407 in 1920), and Cobb (.401 in 1922) and Harry Heilman (.403 in 1923) each broke through. By 1941, however, 11 years had passed since Bill Terry of the New York Giants hit .401 in 1930, the last batter to reach the .400 mark. Williams kept well above the mark during the bulk of the season, but as the campaign wore on he slipped, losing almost a point a day during a late-season ten-game stretch. The Red Sox played their last three games of the season on the road against the Philadelphia Athletics. With an average of .401, statisticians determined that Williams needed 5 hits in the roughly 12 at bats he would receive over the remaining three games. Even after Williams declined to sit out the series, Cronin saw no need for Williams to play every game. "You've got to admire the kid for being so courageous, but if he gets his hits I may yank him in the second game Sunday," said Cronin, according to Sports Illustrated. In the third-to-last game Williams went 1-for-4 to drop his average to .3995555. "A lot of people might be inclined to round that off to .400, and maybe with any other average you would," wrote Richard Hoffer in Sports Illustrated in 1941. "But the papers had it right Sunday morning: 'Williams Drops Below .400.' There was no getting around that. You could stretch .3995555 all the way under the masthead and it still wouldn't amount to .400." "So it all came down to the last day," Hoffer wrote. "Never mind the Kid's terrific year; never mind his game-winning homer in the All-Star Game in Detroit or even the 374-pound tuna he caught on an off day earlier this summer. If he missed .400, it was going to feel like a failed season." The A's had been reluctant to pitch to Williams all season, walking him 14 times in the previous eight meetings. Philadelphia catcher Frankie Hayes, however, told Williams in his first at bat that the team was instructed to pitch right to him. In Williams's first four at bats he ripped three singles and one home run. In the ninth he reached on an error, making him 4-for-5 for the game and pushing his average to .405. Williams was not finished, however. In the second half of the doubleheader he singled in his first appearance and then rocketed a double off of a loudspeaker in right center. He popped out in the seventh. The game was called because of darkness shortly afterward. Williams's 6-for-8 day left his average at .406. "What a thrill," Williams told reporters after the game, according to Sports Illustrated. "I wasn't saying much about it before the game, but I never wanted anything harder in my life." It was the first time a batter hit over .400 for the season in 11 years. Williams was only 23 years old in 1941--they called him the Kid--and many observers figured he would crack .400 several more times in his career. Williams, however, spent three seasons in military service during World War II (1939-1945), in what could have been his prime, and parts of two more seasons flying combat missions in Korea. He never again hit better than .400. Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2009. © 1993-2008 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.