The Reason Why .400 Hitters No Longer Appear

Good morning, everyone. Today, I will be talking about a topic that combines baseball and biology. The person on this cover, Stephen Jay Gould, was an American biologist who was a huge baseball fan. I will introduce him from a book of mine that I read a long time ago.

The book introduced here discusses the reason why .400 hitters have gone extinct. First of all, there has never been a hitter in Japanese professional baseball who has batted .400 over the course of a full season. It is said that when Cromartie, who used to play for the Giants, reached the required number of plate appearances, he was batting over .400, but because he had to keep playing in games, his average dropped below .400. When I looked up current NPB records, the highest batting average was Randy Bass's .389. That's almost .400, isn't it?

Across the ocean, in recent years, Ichiro's batting average from the year he set the record for most hits was listed, but even that was .372. Well, in his case, because he had so many plate appearances, one could say that was the reason he missed out on .400, but in any case, one has to go all the way back to Ted Williams in 1941 for the last .400 hitter in MLB. This was before the war. You have to go back that far to find a .400 hitter.

Now, let's look at the opinion of this scholar, Gould. According to him, it is not that the level of baseball has declined, but rather that .400 hitters have stopped appearing precisely because baseball has matured as a sport. Naturally, pitchers have also improved to an unbelievable level compared to back then. Fielding has also been trained quite extensively. When that happens, even if the level of hitters rises, it is difficult to get hits. Nowadays, if you can hit .300, you are a top-tier player, but it has become that difficult to earn a batting average.

When you think about it, it is natural, and the fact that the overall level of baseball has risen can be seen in pitching speeds. Compared to the old days when there were almost no 100 mph pitchers, now they are everywhere. In fact, it has reached the point where you feel something is missing if a fastball isn't 100 mph. Once it gets to this point, it is even harder for hitters. Just thinking about this alone, you can understand the reason why .400 hitters have disappeared. Also, as is the case in the world of statistics, when things mature, the variance decreases. There are no exceptionally good results, nor are there bad results. Thinking about it that way, the reason that baseball has matured is convincing.

So, if a .400 hitter were to appear in the baseball world in the future, they would be a truly amazing person. To be able to achieve such results in a world where the level of pitching has risen this much. Come to think of it, there are many baseball records in the modern era that are impossible to break. Limiting it to the NPB, one could say that a 400-win pitcher will never appear. That is a record that was only possible because there was no division of labor for pitchers back then. If you think about it normally, it is amazing just to win 20 games in a year, but you would have to do that for 20 consecutive years. If it were today, you probably wouldn't even be allowed to pitch that many times. There are various career records, but is there any record that could be broken in the modern, mature era of baseball? If you went all-in on home runs, you might have a chance to break Sadaharu Oh's record, but even then, a season record might be the most you could do. It may be that difficult to leave a record in such a mature sport.