José Altuve and the Quest for .400

José Altuve stands in a strange place in baseball. His batting average, at .337 as of Monday, leads the American League and led all of baseball for much of the season. That, in itself, is not surprising: Altuve led the majors in batting in 2014, finishing the season with a .341 average. In fact, his .311 average since his rookie year, 2011, is bested by precisely one player over that span: two-time MVP Miguel Cabrera. So talk of Altuve as a great hitter is widespread, as it should be.

But in terms of records, even those with the best batting averages are rarely mentioned in connection with the hallowed figure in that field: Ted Williams’ .406 average in 1941. That makes sense, in some ways. Altuve’s season high this year, .366 on Aug. 20, is still 34 points shy of .400, not an easy distance to make up with just a month to go in the season. But there is also another reason: many observers of the game consider Williams’ mark to be unreachable by modern hitters.

Whenever a modern player gets within shouting distance of .400, the usual objections surface. Hitting .400, one 2014 article claimed, “has forever gone the way of the jitterbug and flannel uniforms for a variety of reasons. The game now tilts to specialization. Modern bullpens. A media crunch that would make the September spotlight impossibly blinding.” Add to that the recent explosion of defensive shifts, and Williams’ mark can come to look unreachable.

But are these analyses accurate? Do the changes in the game actually affect the quest for .400, or is the real problem that Williams was a uniquely talented player, the likes of which is rarely seen in any era. Is the modern game the only thing holding Altuve and his brethren back? It’s worth examining the theories one-by-one.

Different Pitchers

In a Washington Post article earlier this year, Hall-of-Famer Rod Carew reflected on his own flirtation with .400 (he hit .388 in 1977, the year he won the MVP award). “Pitching today, you’re not seeing the same pitcher every time…. You might see four or five pitchers during the game, younger guys who are fresh and throwing hard.”

There is no doubt that teams use relievers differently now than they did in Carew’s day. He had 471 plate appearances against starting pitchers in 1971, and batted .397 against them. He had 223 PAs against relievers, and hit “only” .368. In contrast, as of Sept. 15 this year, Altuve has hit off starting pitching in 417 PAs with a .375 average against them–not far off Carew’s pace. Against relievers, though, Altuve fares worse, with a .279 average in 230 PAs. Not only is he hitting far worse against relievers, he’s hitting against them more often: 35.5 percent of the time, compared with Carew’s 32.1 percent in 1977. Relievers are being used more, and more effectively.

The difference is even more pronounced in comparing Altuve’s 2016 season to Williams’s 1941 campaign. Retrosheet has the play-by-play for only 75 of Williams’s 143 games that year, but in those games, he hit an astounding .487 against starting pitchers in 248 PAs. Against relievers, Williams batted .353 in just 71 PAs. The drop-off hurt Williams less, since those PAs against relievers were just 22.2 percent of his total. Back then, seeing a fresh pitcher late in the game was not nearly as common; complete games accounted for 43.6 percent of games in 1941, versus just 2.1 percent in 2015. Even in 1941, facing a well-rested reliever took something off a batter’s average; the difference now is that it takes more and does so more often.

Repeat appearances

A related point often raised is that, as pitchers stayed in the game longer, hitters of old would learn their mechanics, notice patterns, and (aided by the pitchers’ fatigue) hit better against them in later innings. Here, the results fit the story less completely. Looking at Williams’s average by plate appearance, we can see that his best average was in his second time at the plate per game, when he got a hit more than half the time–.509. As the game went on, Williams’s average actually declined. By his fifth PA, he hit a merely mortal .308.

A similar pattern holds for near-.400 hitters closer to our own time. In 1977, Carew was at his best in his third PA, worst in his fourth. In 1980, when he hit .390, George Brett’s average declined from first to fourth PAs, then rebounded in the late innings, but there is no clear pattern of improvement against tired pitchers. Similarly, in Tony Gwynn’s 1994 season (.394) and Ichiro Suzuki’s 2004 effort (.372), both hitters are fairly consistent across plate appearances.

Altuve’s average per PA this year distinctly departs from this pattern. He hits in the high .300s for the first four PAs (.365 overall), but in the fifth PA and later, he loses two hundred points off his average, falling to .145 overall. Late innings have not been Altuve’s friend in the quest for .400. Given the modern pattern of pitching, this result overlaps almost completely with his season split between starters and relievers, except for the fourth PA, which is almost always against a middle reliever in 2016. In that PA, Altuve is at his best, hitting .379. Perhaps the penalty he pays against closers is offset, somewhat, by hitting better against middle relief.

It’s a Long Season

Two theories that overlap somewhat arise from an analysis of Williams’ 1941 season. Williams started the year with an ankle injury and played only one full game before April 29. Although he pinch hit several times before then (there was no short-term disabled list in 1941) that meant that Williams had only 19 PAs in April. He re-injured the ankle in July, which meant there were a further 13 games that month in which he either pinch hit or sat out entirely. That left him with 606 total PAs, about 70 fewer than he would see in a typical season at that point in his career.

This leads to two theories. The first: that maintaining a .400 while playing a full 162-game season is extremely difficult. Pete Rose elaborated on this point in 2014: “I think a guy could hit .400, but I don’t think anybody in the world can get 200-for-500. I think you can get 350 at-bats, 300 at-bats and hit .400, but to get 200-for-500, that’s .400.” Williams had 456 ABs in 1941, which at first seems to confirm Rose’s point. On the other hand, Williams went into the last day of the season hitting slightly below .400. Only going 6-for-9 in a doubleheader against the Philadelphia Athletics boosted his average to .406. For Williams, the short season may have helped, but those last nine at-bats helped even more.

Some of the other near-.400 seasons follow this pattern. Brett’s 1980 run was interrupted by a month-long stretch on the disabled list in the middle of the season. We he came back to active service on July 10, he hit an astounding .488 for the rest of the month. Brett finished the season with 515 PAs and just 449 AB. Gwynn’s 1994 run was similarly brief. After missing six games in April, he played almost every day until the players went on strike in mid-August. When the rest of the season was canceled, he had just 475 PAs and 419 ABs.

Although both Brett and Gwynn would surely liked to have played more, it is hard to deny that their abbreviated seasons may have helped their averages. That said, Carew’s 1977 season is all the more impressive in that he played nearly every day, finishing with 694 PAs and 616 ABs. Only two players have ever hit .400 with more PAs than 694–Rogers Hornsby (1922) and Bill Terry (1930). Altuve, by playing almost every day (he led the league in ABs last year) helps his team with his durability, but likely reduces his chance at the record books.

Missing April

The other theory derived from Williams’ 1941 season considers not just the number of games missed, but the timing. By missing those cold early-season games in April, the theory goes, Williams avoided what is for most ballplayers the worst month to hit. Furthermore, the major league season used to start later in April than it does now—the 1941 Red Sox played their first game on April 15—letting even healthy players avoid the coldest days. This April effect holds for some of the other hitters who approached .400. Take out the month of April, when he hit .289, and George Brett would have finished with a .407 average in 1980. Ichiro’s .372 average in 2004 would have been 20 points higher without his April ABs.

But one development in the modern game is more helpful to the would-be .400 hitter. April is thought to be harder to hit in because of the cold weather. In 1941, this was more pronounced, with all of major league baseball being concentrated north of Washington and east of St. Louis–a region full of chilly April days. Now, with the spread of the game to the warmer parts of the country, cold Aprils are less an issue. Gwynn hit .395 in April 1994 in sunny San Diego, one point above his average for the year. Altuve’s April 2016 performance fits this pattern. In that month he hit just .265 in road games in cold cities (i.e., where the high temperature on the day of the game was in the 60s or cooler) while hitting .345 in April games either at home in Houston or in warm road games. So, while the early start to the season harms the modern high-average hitter, expansion to the South and West cancels much of the effect.

Advances in Defense

One major change even since Ichiro’s .372-hitting 2004 season is the rise of defensive shifts. Shifts have been widely credited (or blamed) for lowering batting averages major league-wide. As a 2014 New York Times article says, there are accounts of a shift being used against Williams as early as 1941, but that was a rare exception. The modern practice of moving fielders many times within a game is revolutionary, and believed to be the cause of reduced offense.

Detailed information about fielding does not exist for most of the seasons discussed in this article, but we can examine Altuve’s performance against the shift on his FanGraphs player page. The numbers show that, at least for some hitters, the effect of the shift is exaggerated. In 2016, Altuve has hit .344 when a normal defense was in place and .431 when a shift was employed. The sample sizes are small, admittedly, but the numbers are consistent across his career: .333 without the shift .426 with it. Offense may be down across baseball but, at least in Altuve’s case, the shift is not the reason.

Can It Be Done?

These stats show that changes in baseball since 1941 weigh against the would-be .400 hitter, but maybe not to the extent pundits have claimed. When MLB added eight more games and started the season earlier in April, it did hitters no favors, but playing those games in warm-weather venues mitigates a lot of the harm. Defensive shifts are increasingly popular, but as Altuve’s stats show, they are not always a hindrance to a hitter who uses the entire field. Having too many at-bats is a problem for some, but as Carew demonstrated in his 1977 season, it need not be fatal to the effort.

The biggest problem facing Altuve and other high-average hitters is their performance against relievers. In this, they face a challenge unlike those dealt with by Williams, or even Carew, Brett and Gwynn. Because he is good with his glove, Altuve stays in games until the end, while a less capable fielder might be lifted a for late-inning defensive replacement. Until he learns to master closers and situational relievers, .400 will remain out of reach.

That said, it is clear that the attainment is not as unreachable as it seems. Some records, like Cy Young’s 511 career wins, or Sam Crawford’s 309 career triples, almost certainly belong to a bygone age, never to be equaled. But hitting for average is a skill that still holds value in the modern game. In 1977, 1980, 1994 and 2004, we saw hitters fall just short of .400. That they came so close should give us hope that the mark is not out of reach forever. Someday, someone—maybe José Altuve, maybe someone else—will get there.