Ted Williams: Baseball’s Last .400 Hitter
September 28, 2015
On September 28, 1941, Boston Red Sox slugger Ted Williams became the last Major League Baseball player to finish a season with a .400 batting average. Hitting .400 (4 hits for every 10 at bats) was once the benchmark of the game’s greatest hitters. Since 1941, however, the evolution of the game—more ballplayers, stronger and more athletic pitchers, longer seasons—has prevented anyone else from repeating the .400 feat. And Williams’ accomplishment was a near-run thing itself…
Ted Williams ranks among the leading modern players in both lifetime batting average and home runs. In 1941, he batted .406, marking the last time any player hit over .400 in a season. AP/Wide World
Williams finished the game on September 27 with a batting average of .39955, which rounds up to .400. He could have sat out the last games (a doubleheader the next day), and walked away as a .400 hitter. But Williams wasn’t satisfied. In his mind, he would have been a .399 hitter. As he put it, “If I’m going to be a .400 hitter, I want more than my toenails on the line.”
So the 23-year-old outfielder insisted on playing both games the next day. And what a day he had. In 8 at-bats, Williams had 6 hits, finishing the season at a robust .406—with much more than his toenails on the line. Since that remarkable finish in 1941, no Major Leaguer has hit .400, although two got very close: George Brett hit .390 in 1980 and Tony Gwynn hit .394 in the strike-shortened 1994 season.
On September 28, 1960, 19 years to the day after his 6 for 8 doubleheader performance, Williams stepped to the plate in the 8th inning of the final game of the season—the final game of his career, his final big league at bat. And he hit a home run. No toenails on the line there, either.
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