SimonDoom
Kink Lord
- Joined
- Apr 9, 2015
- Posts
- 19,599
I didn't mean to imply for a whole season. I was speaking of individual games, but it isn't unheard of in a single series in postseason play to get there. Carlos Beltrán hit .435 in the 2004 postseason with eight home runs. Proving my point about swinging for the fence, Nelson Cruz scored eight home runs in a 2011 postseason series. In the 2020 postseason, Seager also hit eight home runs, tying with Carlos Beltrán, Nelson Cruz, Barry Bonds, and Adolis García. Randy Arozarena holds the record for most home runs in a single postseason series, with a remarkable 10 in the 2020 postseason. In the current season, at the moment, Aaron Judge has the highest batting average since 2000, with an average of .395.
And yes, no one has maintained a 400 for an entire season in forever. But hope springs eternal, right?
Aaron Judge, as of today, is up to .398 at the beginning of June. That's remarkable. It's possible.
I recall watching an interview with the late biology professor --and die-hard Yankees fan-- Stephen Jay Gould, who explained the disappearance of the .400 hitter. It's because baseball players have, overall, gotten better, not worse. As the overall quality rises, it becomes more difficult to be an outlier. The distribution curve changes, so it's harder than ever to be a .400 hitter. Average pitching it much better than it used to be (not "use to be"



Another factor working against batting average is that with the rise of sabermetrics players focus more on on-base percentage and on-base percentage + slugging percentage (OPS) more. Barry Bonds was the master of this. He didn't always have the highest batting average but his on base percentage was astronomical because he walked so often. People figured out that getting on base, by whatever method, was more important than getting a hit, in terms of value to the team.