Minimum Quality Standards in Professional Baseball and the Paradoxical Disappearance of the. 400 Hitter

In 1941 Ted Williams batted .406, thus accomplishing for the final time a feat that was once relatively common in Major League Baseball. By the time "Teddy Ballgame" surpassed the mark, .400 hitters had already become rare. As table 1 shows, twenty-two of the thirty-five times a hitter has batted .400 or better occurred before the turn of the century, and prior to Williams, no one had done it since 1930.

Several explanations have been offered for this trend. The first is that players were simply better back then. ("There were giants in those days.") This explanation, however, is based more on nostalgia than any firm evidence. The fact is that the league batting average has remained remarkably stable throughout the history of professional baseball. Referring again to table 1, note that the league average from 1876–1890—a period when twelve players batted over .400—was .259, exactly the same as it was for the decade of the 1980s, and lower than it was for the 1990s. But beyond the numbers it is simply implausible to argue that today's exquisitely conditioned and trained players are inferior to their counterparts from a century ago, not to mention the greatly increased pool of talent that became available with the influx of Latin and black players, which occurred after the last .400 hitter.

Two other explanations are based on changing strategies of the game.¹ The first is that the style of play after about 1920 (when Babe Ruth first appeared on the scene) began to emphasize power over high batting averages, bunting, and stolen bases. The second is the specialization of relief pitching, which occurred around the same time and confronted hitters in late innings with top-flight pitchers rather than tiring starters or mop-up men. While these explanations are more plausible, they, too, are inconsistent with the fact that the league average has remained steady while extreme performances have disappeared.

The late Stephen Jay Gould has offered a different kind of explanation for the "extinction" of the .400 hitter based on an analogy to biological evolution.² He argued that the downward trend in maximum averages, accompanied by a corresponding increase in minimum averages, reflects a general decrease in variation in averages around a stable mean as the game has matured and methods of play have become standardized. According to this interpretation, .400 averages were in effect "outliers" in the overall distribution of averages and disappeared as the variance of the distribution decreased. Gould summarized his argument as follows:

Variation in batting average must decrease as improving play eliminates the rough edges that great players can exploit, and as average play moves toward the limits of human possibility and compresses great players into an ever decreasing space between average play and the immovable [limit of human capacity].³

Zimbalist has advanced a similar argument:

The fact that a smaller proportion of a more athletically talented population is playing baseball produces . . . compression of talent at the top end. The variation among players in performance statistics has narrowed steadily over the years. . . . Today's top sluggers face fewer weak pitchers and more excellent hurlers with a broad array of dazzling pitches than did Babe Ruth, Jimmy Foxx, and Hank Greenberg.⁴

Table 1.

League batting average and number of .400 hitters¹⁴

Another way to say this is that the "technology" of baseball has changed in such a way as to eliminate the lower tail of the talent distribution. But this is where the analogy between baseball and biology ends, for in biology the weeding out of inferior organisms occurs as a result of random mutations filtered through the environment (the process of natural selection). In contrast the weeding out of inferior players has occurred in baseball by means of a conscious effort ("artificial" selection) through better scouting, better coaching, better equipment, and better conditioning of players. The reason that there has not been a concomitant increase in league averages as a result of these changes is due to...