With apologies to Joe Mauer and his wonderful .380 average, ain't nobody, no-how, no-way ever hitting .400 in the Major Leagues over a full season. And perhaps just as difficult is a team to maintain a .300 average through the season as a club. I realize that's getting a hit less than one-third of the time, but it's still not entirely possible.
For proof let's turn to the world of Fantasy Baseball, where there are only 12 teams vying for all of the league's best players and there are no real-world concerns like no-trade clauses and salaries and restrictions on free agents. Even with all of that going for us in Fantasy land, the team with the highest average in our league is batting, as a club, .298. As for me, despite having the league-leading Joe Mauer and several other top hitters, my club is averaging just .281 at the plate.
And despite all of this high-priced talent, would you believe that my team and the first-place team in our league combined for an embarrassing 3 for 45 at the plate tonight. The fact that two Fantasy teams could combine for a .067 average over the course of a day just goes to show exactly how hard hitting a Major League pitch really is. Everybody has a bad day now and then. But for 14 of the best players in the bigs, most of them All-Stars, combine for a 3 for 45 day?
That's just preposterous. Yet not that rare of an occurrence. And that's why someone hitting .400 in this day and age of specialty pitchers and over-sized bullpens will be one of the single greatest sports accomplishments in the modern era. More significant than Kobe's 81 points, more impressive than Shaun's 28 touchdowns, and an even bigger deal than the Red Sox finally winning a World Series. Hitting .400 is like seeing a unicorn dealing 5-card draw to Bigfoot while riding the back of the Loch Ness Monster.
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