You can ask about a single year or a career. It doesn’t matter. It’s the same guy either way, and nobody will get it right. People will guess Rod Carew, Albert Pujols, Roberto Clemente, Manny Ramirez, Edgar Martinez …
It’s none of them.
The answer is Ted Williams. Mr. Ballgame hated to discuss his roots and always changed the subject when the topic arose. His mother was a Mexican-American from El Paso. Both of his maternal grandparents were born in Valle de Allende, Chihuahua, Mexico.
Of course, Latinos consider him an Anglo. MLB considers him an Anglo. Williams identified as an Anglo and seemed to be ashamed of his mother’s world.
But, as the gamblers say, the cards speak for themselves.
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A little more Ted Williams trivia:
* His birth name was “Teddy.” He hated it and legally changed it to Theodore.
* When Williams played for his high school team, he was a pitcher.
* But in his senior year of high school, he played AAA baseball (then called AA) in the Pacific Coast League. The stadium was near his home. His family would not let him go on road trips until he graduated.
* Williams’ famous .406 season was actually .413 using today’s scoring rules. Run-scoring flyballs were counted as an at-bat from 1931 to 1953 (excluding 1939 for some reason which escapes me), thereby reducing one’s batting average. Williams hit eight of them in 1941. The rule was changed for the 1954 season, and stayed that way for all subsequent years, so those flies are no longer penalized as an at-bat. There’s an even odder twist to the sac fly story, although it does not affect Williams. Before the 1954 season, they really couldn’t decide what to do with this rule so they kept tinkering with it, as evidenced by the 1939 anomaly mentioned above. The real oddball period was from 1927 to 1930 when no at-bat was charged on any fly ball where the runner advanced – to any base, not just home plate. As you know if you are a fan, they had some huge averages in those years, especially 1930, when the major league average was .292. Batting averages dropped 15 points in 1931, when all fly ball outs counted as at-bats.
Williams’s batting average in 1941 is the most overrated stat in baseball history. He wasn’t even near the record, and yet how many people think it is the record? He was just the last person to bat over .400 in the AL or NL! How Many people know Hugh Duffy, who had the single season record prior the integration of Negro League records?
It’s pretty clear that Williams did it in a much more difficult time to hit. Lots of players hit over .400 in the early years proving it wasn’t a big deal. Williams is a far better hitter than those earlier players and it isn’t even a debate. If Williams didn’t spend 5 prime years in 2 wars he would have been the all-time hr leader as well.
It would have been close, but I think he would have been just short if he retired at the same time. In those years he was good for about 670 plate appearances per year, or 3350 PA for five years. He actually had about 120 miscellaneous PA in the Korea years, so he lost some 3230. At the rate he was hitting homers in the two years before and after WW2 and the two years before and after Korea, he would have added about 169 homers, giving him 690 lifetime. So the question becomes “Would he have kept playing another year or two if he had been within 24 of the Bambino?” I think he probably would have. In his final year he batted .316 with 29 homers, so he hadn’t lost much, and the following year was the infamous 1961 expansion year, when he could have been salivating over the possibility of facing those diluted pitching staffs. I think he would have made it. His ego was big enough, and his sense of baseball history was powerful enough, that he would have cherished being the all-time HR king.
.388 at 39 in 1957. I have a 1958 card with that for his yearly and his lifetime at an even.350.
He needed only five more hits to reach .400 a second time. He was standing at .426 at the end of April and .411 at the end of May. The heat and his tired legs failed him, but he could hit as well as ever.
What many fail to realize is that the 38-year-old man had a .731 slugging average that year and hit 38 homers in only 420 at bats. That slugging percentage was almost identical to the percentage he put up in his amazing 1941 season. It is a higher percentage than the very best seasons of Mickey Mantle and Stan Musial (for example). It is a MUCH higher percentage than the very best seasons of Hank Aaron or Willie Mays.
Here’s the capper. In the past 100 years, among all seasons with 500 or more PA, excluding Barry Bonds, Ted’s 1957 season had the second best OPS+. The one season that beat him? His own epic 1941 season.
And that one barely beat him: 235-233.
The man was a beast!
Sure, the league averages had dropped, and Williams’s .406 is really impressive (every .400 average is), but I guarantee you that most fans who are more casual think it’s the record. That’s what makes it overrated.
OPS+ is a way better tool to measure how good a hitter is than BA, but we’re just talking about BA here.
To repeat, Duffy’s batting average was only 42% better than the league average, while Ted’s was 53% better. Even when discussing batting average alone, Ted’s season was better.
1894 was just a fluke year because of the newly increased distance from the mound to the plate. Batting averages were just nuts. The Phillies alone had four .400 hitters and another guy at .387.
Having noted that, I have to add that .440 is spectacular.
Side note: in seasons that qualified for the batting title, given at least 300 plate appearances, Josh Gibson batted .466 in 1943. That was the year he knocked in 109 runs in 69 games. The league average was only .279, so he was 67% above the league average, leaving Ted in the dust!
To take nothing away from Hugh Duffy, it’s good to recall that everyone had big numbers in 1894. That was the second year after the pitching distance had been expanded to 60 feet, and pitchers who had been tossing from 50 feet with a running start were overmatched for a while. The years from 1893 to 1897 were easy pickin’s for batters.
The entire league batted .309 in 1894, and the Phillies batted .350 as a team! All four of the Philadelphia outfielders were over .400. Offensive production didn’t fall back to “normal” levels until 1898, when a new crop of pitchers finally got the hang of things.
In the year when Duffy batted .440, offensive production was an astronomical 7.4 runs per team per game, and Duffy’s batting average was 42% higher than the league average.
In the year when Williams batted .406, offensive production was 4.5 runs per team per game, and Ted’s batting average was 53% higher than the league average.
In terms of total offensive production in seasons with more than 500 PA, Williams’ 1941 season is the best in the past 100 years by anyone not named Barry Bonds. Williams had an OPS+ of 235. On the legendary 1927 Yankees, Ruth and Gehrig came in at 225 and 220. Ol’ Duffy limped in at 175 in 1894, good for no better than 425th place in baseball history.
I’m sure he felt forced to be ashamed of his heritage in those days. I’m Italian and my grandmother in those days told all her sons that they shouldn’t continue schooling after high school because as Italians it wouldn’t matter. They should all just get jobs working for the city digging ditches. There really is no difference between the latinos and most white people in the US. If they didn’t speak a different language, I doubt people would even think about it. Most all the children of latino parents born in the US will grow up much like Williams did, as just another white guy.
Yup. Already happening. When I lived in Texas I worked with plenty of younger guys with Spanish last names, but if not for those family names I would not have known they came from Mexican (or other Latino) families. They were as Mexican as I was Polish. We were all just Americans.
Teachers will tell you today that the kids don’t even know whether their great-grandparents were Lithuanian or Spanish or Peruvian, and they don’t care. The question doesn’t even seem to interest them. We still thought about that when I was a kid. In Catholic schools we were aware of which kids were Irish, Italian or Polish, and our families celebrated holidays in distinctive ethnic fashion. That didn’t really matter too much in the ‘burbs, where everyone played and learned together, but those distinctions were still meaningful in the cities, where people lived in ethnic enclaves. In the ‘burbs, I was Greg to everyone, but when we went to church in Polishtown, where my grandparents still lived, I was Grzesz!