30 or .400

I love baseball.  I love history.  There is a lot of history in sports.  Benchmarks are meant to be broken.  Sometimes.  There are things that have happened that I think will never be surpassed.  The career strikeouts will never be broken.  Nolan Ryan was a beast.  And he beat the shit out of Robin Ventura (go to Google and start typing his name and the first thing that comes up is this fight).  The fifty six game hit streak will never be surpassed.  Not because there are not great hitters, it's just not going to happen.  Pitchers are so good right now and players in the field are getting more and more athletic.

So I was thinking, which of the history making season accomplishments would I like to see?  Would I like to see a thirty game winner or a batter hit .400?  It'd be awesome to see both happen in my life because I like to see history being made.  Hitting .400 would be more impressive because the hitters play the majority of the games each season whereas the pitchers throw once every five or six days.  Granted, pitchers put more strain on their arm than a batter does on their body but the batters also play the field and have a chance of injuring themselves out there.  There is no good argument for one position being more of a strain over the other.

Since the last thirty game winner (Detroit's Cocaine [mean, I know, but it rhymes] McLain!) in 1968, the closest anyone has come to a thirty win season is twenty seven games.  Twice.  1972 (Steve Carlton) and 1990 (Bob Welch).  After the '68 season, MLB lowered the pitching mound so the pitchers would have less of an advantage over the hitters.  A couple of years ago, Tim Kurkjain wrote a great article about the '68 season.  As much as it pains me to link an ESPN article, it is Tim Kurkjain and I like him and his squeaky little voice.  Slowly but surely, the pitchers have started to come around and are becoming more impressive and borderline dominant.  Not as dominant as they were in years past, but there seems to be more strikeouts, more no hitters, more perfect games, more EVERYTHING pitcher oriented in the past few years.  I think within ten years, we will see a pitcher win thirty games.  That's right, I'm calling my shot.  Book it.  Even though it's been over forty years since a thirty game winner, the pitchers that are around now are closer to this milestone than the batters are to hitting .400.  

If forty years seems like a long time for a thirty game winner, consider the fact that it has been over seventy years since Ted Williams hit .400.  The closest anyone has come to this record is Tony Gwinn.  He hit .394 in 1994.  Being twelve at the time, I didn't concern myself with baseball things outside the city of Detroit so I don't remember this.  There have been a few seasons with guys hitting in the .370 to .380 range and that seems to be the new .400.  After the steroid era, anyone who is hitting a ton of home runs or hitting way better than their career average, comes under immediate scrutiny.  Looking at the guys who have hit in that .370 to 380 range over the course of the last thirty years, they are considered some of the best hitters of our generation.  Everyone except Barry Bonds.  Fuck that guy.  You have guys like George Brett, Tony Gwinn, Ichiro, Wade Boggs.  You can go back further to hall of fame guys like Clemente, Yaz, and Rose.  None of them ever really came close to .400.  It takes a fast start to the season to get the average up but it also takes consistency throughout the entire year to maintain that average.  If you look at a box score and see someone go 1-3 you think that's pretty decent for a day's work.  That's a .333 average.  But if someone is trying for a .400 season that 1-3 is terrible.  You would have to have several three and four hit games just to recover.  I didn't do the actual math to see what is needed to recover the batting average, I'll leave that to the nerds.

Even with some great hitters in the game right now, the pitchers have the advantage.  In the past decade the best season ending average was Ichiro in 2004 at .370.  In that same time the closest to a thirty win season was Randy Johnson and Justin Verlander.  Both with twenty four wins.  Six off the historic number.  A .400 season is the better of the two accomplishments in my mind, but a thirty win season is nothing to ignore.  One reason would be because the hitters are so far away to getting to that milestone.  A batter would have to be focused for half a calendar year.  There can be no slumps.  There can be no bad at bats.  There can only be hits.