San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
What to make of shortened season, and who might benefit?
“I certainly think a .400 hitter is possible. I don’t know how likely it is. If I were to guess, I’d probably put it at oneinfour chance. I wouldn’t be surprised.” Sean Forman, president and founder, BaseballReference.com
Imagine baseball’s first .400 hitter since Ted Williams in 1941.
Or the home run leader with fewer than 20 for the first time since Cy Williams in 1920.
Or the RBI leader with fewer than 50 for the first time since Deacon White in 1877.
Prepare for baseball in 2020 to create chaos with the sanctity of the records and make fans do double takes years from now when they look back on this strange season.
So much of the sport’s history is associated with the hallowed numbers that players and teams accumulated over the generations, and there’s an excellent chance the 2020 statistics will be dramatically skewed in a bizarre season trimmed to 60 games because of the coronavirus pandemic.
“The leaderboards are going to look weird,” said Sean Forman, president and founder of BaseballReference.com, which is used throughout the industry to look up, research and analyze statistics.
“This is the only season for a lot of players to appear on the leaderboard just because it’s going to be a much higher variance. You can expect really weird teams in the playoffs as well. It takes only a strong 60game stretch to get in.”
No pitcher will reach the 20win milestone in a 60game season. Even 10 would be a significant accomplishment. Starting every fifth game would get a pitcher just 12 starts. Likewise, no one will break the season saves record. Or inningspitched record.
Those are considered counting stats, measuring a player’s quantity of production. Examples include hits, home runs and RBIs. None of those records will be broken in a short season.
It’s a different story with rate stats, which measure a player’s rate of production. For example, batting average, onbase percentage, OPS, ERA, WHIP. This is where history could be made.
If anyone hits .400 this season, still a long shot, he’ll officially become the first since Williams 79 years ago. It’ll be considered legitimate so long as he qualifies with at least 186 plate appearances — the standard average of 3.1 per game times 60 games.
It’s far tougher to maintain a .400 average in a 162game schedule, but there have been plenty of 60game stretches in which batters have hit .400.
Through his first 60 games of the 2008 season, Chipper Jones hit .400. Since then, it has been done four times within a season, according to the Elias Sports Bureau: Hanley Ramirez (2009), Andrew McCutchen (2012), Joey Votto (2016) and Jose Altuve (2017).
“I certainly think a .400 hitter is possible,” Forman said. “I don’t know how likely it is. If I were to guess, I’d probably put it at oneinfour chance. I wouldn’t be surprised.”
If a batter has 186 plate appearances and walks enough so that his atbat total is a mere 150, he’d need 60 hits to bat .400.
“Then it comes down to the historians to decide how that qualifies,” Forman said. “Is that the equivalent of a Ty Cobb season or Rogers Hornsby season? I would tend to say no, it isn’t, because of the shortened season.
“It would be fun to see somebody chase .400. It would definitely be an interesting thing to have happen. Those are the fun things we enjoy arguing about and discussing.”
John Thorn, Major League Baseball’s official historian, said he wouldn’t be bothered if someone hit .400 this year: “I think it would be delightful. It could happen. We’ve had anomalous seasons before.”
The highest batting average last season belonged to White Sox shortstop Tim Anderson, who hit .335. The closest anyone has come to .400 since Williams was Tony Gwynn, who hit .394 in 1994, a season that ended in midAugust because of labor strife.
“My advice to fans,” Thorn said, “would be not to try to compare the outcome of individual statistics in the 2020 season with any season that has ever gone before because this is so difficult for the players, teams and fans.”
Thorn cited several examples of statistical oddities throughout history, including the .315 team batting average for the 1930 Phillies, who finished last in the NL with a 52102 record. And the four outfielders on the 1894 Phillies who all batted above .400. And Al Spalding, credited with all 52 wins for his 1874 Boston Red Stockings, who went 5218. “Nobody says we should throw those statistics out,” Thorn said. “We can either assume there used to be supermen playing the game in the old days or there were special conditions that created these records. I believe the latter verdict will apply to the 2020 season.”
If someone hits .400 in 2020 — or reaches another sacred milestone or record — would the mark be accompanied by an asterisk to denote