08/23/2026
On the last day of the 1941 season, Ted Williams was hitting .39955.
Officially, that rounds up to .400.
His manager offered to sit him. He could have walked away as a .400 hitter without lifting a bat.
He played both games of a doubleheader instead.
Understand what was at stake. Hitting .400 is the most romantic number in baseball. It had been done a handful of times and it was already becoming rare.
Williams was 23 years old. If he sat, the record book would say .400 forever.
He refused.
His reasoning, as he told it for the rest of his life, was that he didn't want to be a .400 hitter with a technicality. He wanted to earn it standing in the box.
So on September 28, 1941, in Philadelphia, Ted Williams played a doubleheader against the Athletics with the single most famous batting average in American sports hanging on it.
He went 6 for 8.
He finished the season at .406.
Nobody has hit .400 in a Major League season since. Eighty five years and counting. It has become one of those records people quietly assume will never be broken again.
And here's the part that makes the whole thing even more absurd.
Ted Williams lost nearly five full seasons of his prime to military service in two different wars. He was a Marine fighter pilot in World War II and flew combat missions in Korea, where he crash landed a burning jet.
He still finished with 521 home runs and a career .344 average.
His final at bat, in his last game in 1960 at Fenway Park, he hit a home run. Then he ran the bases, went into the dugout, and never came out to tip his cap.
And when he was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1966, he used his speech to argue that Negro Leagues greats like Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson belonged in Cooperstown too. That was 1966. He didn't have to say that. He said it anyway, and it's cited as one of the reasons the doors eventually opened.
Two games he could have skipped.
Eight at bats he didn't have to take.
Six hits, and the last .400 season anyone has ever had.
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