N.Y. Sun: Marchman: Chipper’s Impossible Pursuit of .400

Larry and the blue notes...from Marchman.

Ted Williams was unparalleled, of course, but his strikeout rate wasn’t the reason why. In 1941, the American League as a whole struck out in 9.1% of its plate appearances; the Splendid Splinter, in 5.9% of his, 64% of the league average. During the last year, Jones has struck out 10.5% of the time, against a league average of 17.3%, 61% of the average. In context, then, Jones has, of late, been better at putting the bat on the ball than Williams was in his prime — which is pretty impressive, even if he isn’t going to match that .406 average in large part because there is an absolute difference between a league where hitters strike out once every five or so at bats and one where they strike out once every 11.

That the context has changed — that there are twice as many strikeouts in today’s game because hitters swing harder and pitchers throw harder, because of specialized relief pitching and smaller parks that reward a home run swing — is what we really ought to take from a comparison of Jones to the mythic hitters of yore. Baseball changes over time; it gets harder, faster, and mainly it just becomes different, in an absolute sense. A game in which a Williams-class contact hitter strikes out more than an average hitter did in 1941, and in which he hits in small parks off pill-throwing short men toward nimble athletes with huge gloves, may not be one in which hitting .400 is possible. But that doesn’t mean that hitting .375 in it for a full year isn’t, in its own way, nearly as impressive an achievement.