It is commonly said of baseball that it is a game of failure. I could not disagree more. Baseball is a game of pure opportunity. There is no clock that expires before you can score and you are guaranteed your shot on offense.
If a baseball player only hits the ball one out of every three times he is up to bat they are already great. Hit four out of every ten and you are legendary. This is the opportunity baseball presents to its players.
The last player to get a hit four out of every ten times they batted in a season was Ted Williams in 1941. Since then only four players have hit above .380. The highest being .394 by Tony Gwynn in the shortened 1994 MLB season. But what is the big deal? Well Ted Williams actually hit better than .400 in the ’41 season. The story behind it is the big deal and why I think baseball is a game of opportunity.
Ted was only 22 years old. He missed spring training that year with a wrist injury. After May 25th, Williams never let his batting average drop below .393 the rest of the season. On the last day of the season, Williams was batting .400 Boston was playing a double header at Philadelphia. The Red Sox manager, Joe Cronin wanted Williams to sit that day and preserve his .400 batting average but he gave Ted Williams the option to do so or not. He decided to play the first game anyway. Williams went four for five in the first game and his team overcame an 11-3 deficit to win 12-11. Manager Joe Cronin then insisted that Ted sit for the second game and preserve his impressive average.
Ted Williams of course was determined to play. He went two for three that game; Williams finished the season with a .406 batting average. In the 1941 season, Ted Williams only stuck out 27 times and walked 147 times. No hitter has come close to this accomplishment since. Ted Williams is arguably the greatest all-around hitter of all time. Williams had no problem taking advantage of 0-2 counts and almost had a three to one walk to strikeout ratio.
This is a simple story about one player, but if we look around baseball each and every season, we will see many opportunities being seized by players across the Major League.
