20-16

One of the staples of baseball history conversation is talking about what records and accomplishments will never be done again. Fundamental changes in the way the game is played have made records like Cy Young’s 511 wins or Walter Johnson’s 110 career shutouts flat out impossible to break.

Other accomplishments, like Joe DiMaggio’s hitting streak, Nolan Ryan’s strikeout record or Rickey Henderson’s stolen base record are damn near impossible to break, but it’s plausible that one day someone can break these records because the structure of the game still allows it.

Although not necessarily a record, fans have often wondered if we’ll ever see a .400 hitter again.

In this week’s installment of The Stud 400, we check in with Ted Williams and his .406 batting average in 1941. It has now been 84 years since that magical season and although few have ever approached it, is it really impossible to duplicate that feat in the game’s current structure?

The closest anyone has come was Tony Gwynn, who batted .394 in the strike-shortened 1994 season. If Gwynn had flipped just three of his outs into hits, he would have finished at .401 (168-419). That’s pretty damn close to The Splendid Splinter.

George Brett also came close in 1980, finishing at .390. Like Gwynn, Brett had to flip just an agonizingly small number of outs to hits to hit .400. If he just five of his outs were hits instead, Brett would have hit .401 on the season.

Since 2000, there have been 15 seasons where a batter has hit over .350. The highest single season batting averages this millennium has been .372, which was accomplished by Ichiro Suzuki, Nomar Garciaparra and Todd Helton.

How many outs needed to be flipped to reach .400 in those cases? Garciaparra needed 15, Helton would have needed 15 and Ichiro would have needed 20. It’s a pretty big ask to add that many hits onto their already lofty totals, but it really works out to about one extra hit per week.

Will we ever see a .400 batter again? Probably not. But there is a better chance at seeing that than someone winning 512 games.

For today though, we’re all about Ted Williams, the greatest hitter who ever lived, and his spot in the Top 20 of The Stud 400.

Before we move on to this week’s edition of The Stud 400, here’s a look at the last five entries as we count down the 400 greatest moments in Major League Baseball history:

25: George Steinbrenner buys the Yankees (1973)

24: Don Larsen World Series Perfect Game (1956)

23: Kirk Gibson’s World Series HR (1988)

22: Red Sox break the curse (2004)

21: The Buckner Play (1986)

And now, here’s Episode LXXXIII of The Stud 400.

20. Babe Ruth quits pitching full time (1918)

There is an alternate baseball timeline where Babe Ruth stayed with the Red Sox, joined the 400-win club with Walter Johnson and Cy Young and pitched Boston to a gaggle of World Series titles. If that scenario played out, who knows what baseball history would look like? The sale of Ruth to the Yankees certainly changed the course of Major League Baseball and nearly just impactful was Ruth’s transition from pitcher to right fielder. Let’s examine.

Ruth was a full-time pitcher for just three seasons. He made 28 starts in 1915, 40 in 1916 and 38 in 1917. He did not play a single inning in the field at any position those years. Ruth led the American League with a 1.75 ERA and nine shutouts in 1916. He pitched 323 innings and did not allow a single home run. In 1917, he led the AL with 35 complete games. He was in the top 5 in strikeouts both seasons. He still ranks in the top 20 all-time for ERA, winning percentage, fewest hits per nine innings, and home runs allowed per nine innings. His 0.87 postseason ERA is still second all-time for starting pitchers. Ruth also had a remarkable 29.2 scoreless innings streak in World Series games. Ruth and Boston won the World Series in 1915 and 1916 with Ruth never playing anything but pitcher. At the end of the 1917, with all of those accomplishments under his belt, he was still just 22 years old! So with that record, why did Ruth move from the pitcher’s mound to the outfield? Because that’s what Babe wanted.

This was during the Dead Ball Era when baseball was a game of pitching and defense. As much as pitching was valued by management, it was a preposterous thought that someone of Ruth’s mound talents would be converted to a position player. Red Sox manager Ed Barrow even allegedly said that if he took Ruth off the mound, he would be the laughingstock of baseball. But the savvy Ruth saw the way fans reacted to big hits and recognized that he’d have better longevity and make more money playing full time. Essentially, he knew that while he could become an iconic pitcher, he would become Babe Ruth if he was allowed to play and hit every day. Babe Ruth bet on himself, and he was right.

19. Ted Williams hits .406 (1941)

There are plenty of icons who have suited up across the timeline of Major League Baseball. There are also handful of players who are commonly referred to as “immortals” or “inner-circle” guys. Then there are players who have accomplishments and stories both on and off the field that read more like Paul Bunyan tales than those of ballplayers. Outside of Babe Ruth, nobody fits that bill more than Ted Williams. We’re talking his baseball accomplishments, dreaming of what his career numbers would be without missing so much time serving his country, being a hero in two major wars as an ace fighter pilot and even his accomplishments as one of the great fly fishermen who ever lived, it seems there was nothing Williams couldn’t do. The story of him being the last player to hit .400 for a season and how he got there is so “on-brand” for Williams.

Williams entered the 1941 season as a 22-year-old who had already established himself as one of the game’s premiere hitters. He hit .336 over his first two seasons with a 1.041 OPS and had already led the American League in runs scored, RBIs and OBP. Williams got off to a decent start in 1941 and was batting .308 through the Red Sox first 15 games. Just five games later he was up to .383 and he didn’t stop hitting from there. Williams reached the .400 mark with a 4-5 effort against the Yankees in Game 33 of the season and except for a brief 10 games in July, his average never dipped below .400 the rest of the season.

Williams’ average stood at .406 after he went 1-3 in the final regular season game at Fenway Park and with just six road games left across two series, he was looking to become the first .400 hitter in the Majors since Bill Terry in 1930. No American Leaguer had hit .400 since Harry Heilmann in 1923. Williams went just 2-10 in a three-game series against the Washington Senators though and with three games left against the Philadelphia A’s. Williams’ average stood at .401. Lefty Roger Wolff gave up 12 hits to Boston in the series opener, but only one to Williams, who went 1-4 on the day. The next day featured a season-ending doubleheader and Williams’ average stood at .3995, which would have been rounded up to .400 by the slimmest of margins. Williams could have sat out to reach the milestone, but there was no way The Splendid Splinter would back-door his way to an accomplishment of this magnitude. Williams got hits in each of his first four at bats in Game 1 of the doubleheader, including a home run, and raised his average to .404 going into the final game of the season. Still not content, Williams went 2-3 in the final game to boost his final average to .406 on the season. There just will never be another Ted Williams.

18. Roberto Clemente dies in a plane crash (1973)

In a glimpse of transparency, one of the things that I struggled with creating The Stud 400 was how to handle the game’s tragedies. The goal of this marathon was to identify 400 moments that “shaped baseball history” and then rank them in order of impact on the game. With those parameters, you can’t just omit the many massive tragedies the game has experienced, but something about ranking tragedies doesn’t seem fully kosher. It’s kinda shitty to sit here and say that Jose Fernandez’s death was more impactful than Nick Adenhardt’s but didn’t make as much of an impact as Lyman Bostock’s murder. It feels dirty to type that, but that’s reality in The Stud 400 and we’ll just have to suck it up as we have now reached the top ranked tragedy in our countdown, the death of Roberto Clemente.

Clemente is one of the game’s immortals. A sublimely athletic talent, respected leader and world class humanitarian. You simply couldn’t ask for more of a human being, let alone a ballplayer. The story of his mission is well known, but worth recounting. It was New Year’s Eve 1972 and Clemente was personally overseeing a delivery of disaster relief supplies to Nicaragua, which had been devastated by an earthquake. The chartered DC-7 plane carried supplies and five souls, including Clemente. The plane took off from San Juan, Puerto Rico, made its first turn and experienced an engine failure. The plane, which was carrying more weight than it could safely handle, crashed into the ocean just one mile offshore. All five people on board died and only the pilot’s body was discovered. The investigation turned up questions about the crew, the freight and the plane itself, which had been involved in a damaging non-fatal accident less than a month earlier. One of the more heartbreaking things about the crash is that it was totally avoidable.

Clemente’s legacy on the field made him one of the game’s great players, but it was the man himself who used his platform as a historic player to become one of the game’s immortals. His number 21 should be retired across baseball.

17. Black Sox Scandal (1919)

As we get to the top of The Stud 400, we start to come across the highest ranking “moments” in the subcategories of the list. We just had our highest-ranking tragedy and we’re still zeroing in on our highest-ranking home run and World Series moment. In this entry, we reach the highest-ranking scandal in baseball history – and unfortunately there were many along the way. This is the scandal that inspired books and movies, changed the entire structure of Major League Baseball and is still dissected frequently over 100 years later. We’re of course talking about the 1919 Black Sox scandal. The scandal has been covered so many times in so many ways, that most baseball fans are familiar with the details.

The White Sox, owned by the miserly Charles Comiskey, had won the American League and were set to face the Reds in the World Series. On September 18, 1919, White Sox first baseman Chick Gandil met with Boston bookmaker Joe Sullivan and discussed plans to throw the World Series for a fee of $80,000. Gandil held a meeting in his hotel room with some of his teammates and hatched the plan. Of note is that Shoeless Joe Jackson did not attend this meeting. As Game 1 approached, rumors of a fix already had started. Large amounts of cash had been bet on the Reds to the point where the odds of the Series plummeted. Rumors were so prevalent that Christy Mathewson vowed to keep a close eye on the game and compare his notes with reporter Hugh Fullerton, who had also heard the rumblings. When the second pitch of Game 1 drilled Reds batter Morrie Rath, it was a signal that the fix was on. However, when the players didn’t receive money and started to question whether or not they would ever be paid, the Sox turned around and won Games 6 and 7 of the nine-game series. However, the Reds took Game 8 to win the Series. Gandil received $35,000 for his role in the fix while the other players ended up receiving $5,000 each.

Rumors of the fix carried over into the 1920 season and a trial on the Series happened in the summer of 1921. The details of the trail took many twists and turns, including William Burns mentioning that renowned mobster Arnold “Ace” Rothstein was involved. However, at the conclusion of the trial and after three hours of deliberation, the defendants were found not guilty. To digress a bit, at the time Major League Baseball was governed by the National Baseball Commission and, basically, they sucked. In order to bring integrity to the game after the scandal, the Commission was disbanded with the idea that a new three-man commission would rule over the sport. Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis was approached to lead the commission, but he said that if he was to take such a role, it would be as the sole commissioner with the unchecked power to lord over the game. The owners agreed and Landis became the game’s first commissioner. Despite being found not guilty, Landis banned eight members of the White Sox for their role in the scandal. These men, Jackson, Gandil, Ed Cicotte, Oscar Felsch, Fred McMullin, Swede Risberg, Buck Weaver and Lefty Williams remained banned until the decree was lifted by Rob Manfred in May of 2025.

16. Brooklyn Dodgers finally win it all (1955)

While every World Series win is historic, one of them has to be deemed as the most historic – and we’re landing on the 1955 World Series to stake that claim in The Stud 400. The series featured the New York Yankees and the Brooklyn Dodgers, who were looking to exorcise a bucketful of demons from their past. The Dodgers were founded in 1890 and captured eight National League titles between 1900-1954. They had a grand total of zero World Series championships to show for it.

The Yankees, well, they were the Yankees at their peak. They had gone through the eras of Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio and were now onto their prime Mickey Mantle years. To put that into context, starting with the Murderer’s Row Yankees of 1927, the Bronx Bombers made the World Series 16 times prior to 1955 and won 15 of them! Overall they were 17-4 in World Series with their only losses coming in 1921, 1922, 1926 and 1942. They were as powerful a juggernaut as there was in the game. Leading up to the 1955 Series, the Yankees had beaten the Dodgers in 1947, 1949, 1952 and 1953 and many wondered if they would ever get over the hump.

Things looked bleak for the Dodgers at the start of the 1955 World Series as the Yankees won the first two games in the Bronx. Things shifted over to Brooklyn where the Dodgers regained their footing. They won all three games at home, but if they were going to finally going to reach the top of the mountain, they would have to win one game in the Bronx. That wasn’t Game 6 as the Yankees bounced back for an easy 5-1 win, setting up a classic Game 7. The Dodgers Johnny Podres and Tommy Byrne for the Yanks each put up zeroes through the first three innings as pressure mounted. The Dodgers finally broke through in the fourth when Gil Hodges stroked a two-out single to drive home Roy Campanella. Hodges drove home another run in the sixth on a sacrifice fly. The Yanks looked to answer right back as Billy Martin and Gil McDougald got on base to lead off the inning, but a long fly ball to left by Yogi Berra was run down by Sandy Amoros, who doubled an overzealous MacDougald off first.

The Yankees threatened in the eighth when they had two runners on with one out, but Podres wiggled out of the again by getting Berra to fly out and retiring Hank Bauer on a strikeout. The Yanks went down in order in the ninth as the Dodgers nailed down the improbable win.

The World Series win would be the only one the Dodgers secured during their time in Brooklyn. Both teams returned to the World Series the next year, with the Yankees exacting revenge. The 1955 World Series was the first loss for a Casey Stengel-led team. Podres was named as the World Series MVP, the first year it was awarded. The 1950s are seen as the Golden Age of baseball in New York. The Yankees, Dodgers and Giants all won World Series in the decade and the post-War revival of the sport in the city led to tremendous passion for fans in the rivalries. It’s amazing to think that we’d go from this legendary run of baseball in New York City to having two of the three teams flee for the West Coast just a few short years later. But that glorious fall of 1955, Dem Bums from Brooklyn became The Boys of Summer and Ebbets Field became the center of the baseball universe.

Stay tuned for next week’s episode of The Stud 400 when two off-field moments crack the top 15. We’re also breaking down what we have ranked as the #4 and #5 home runs ever hit. Both were postseason homers; can you guess what they are? We’re also toppling one of the biggest records to ever fall. We’re getting the green light and going under the knife next week, so join us in The Stud 400 as we have the finish line in sight!