Last summer I wrote a series on Anthrodendum about beaches and baseball. I plan to do a bit more of the same this summer. Considering everything that’s going on in the world these days, this may be a retreat into escapism, and I’ll own that. Of course, baseball isn’t immune to the politics, inequalities, and complexities of humanity by any means (see this recent series by the journalist Jerry Brewer, for starters), but it’s still possible to find moments of respite here and there.
Baseball is good like that, at least for me. But what’s funny is that I often end up ‘taking a break’ by watching or going to baseball games–and then end up thinking through all kinds of things by thinking about baseball. What a total social scientist move. So much for the break!
Anyway, I want to talk about why nobody hits .400 anymore. Stephen Jay Gould, one of my favorite essayists, wrote a classic piece about this issue years ago (Gould 2004).
Gould’s essay, at its heart, looks into the question of whether or not baseball–and its heroes–were better back in the day. One thing we don’t see anymore these days is anyone who hits .400…or even comes close. Gould asks why this is the case. Is it because we don’t have great players anymore? Or is there something else going on here? The short version of Gould’s argument is that there is indeed something else at play.
So what’s going on? According to Gould:
Declining variation becomes the key to our puzzle. Hitting .400 isn’t a thing in itself, but an extreme value in the distribution of batting averages … As variation shrinks around a constant mean batting average, .400 hitting disappears. It is, I think, as simple as that.
This declining variation, he argues, is due to humans running up against the limits of their capacity. This is actually not a sign of decline, but rather improvement in overall play: “The extinction of .400 hitting is, paradoxically, a mark of increasingly better play” (163).
Gould uses batting average as the main statistic to demonstrate his argument. He also used a somewhat unfortunate graph for his argument. Michael Friendly and Jim Albert have discussed some of the problems with his graph. It’s not great. Thanks to Albert and a little bit of R code, here’s a recreation of Gould’s graph, which is just not very intuitive to read:
I updated Albert’s recreation of Gould’s graph just a bit by limiting the years to 1875-1980 (rather than up through 2015), just to make it look more like what Gould has in his book. Here’s Albert’s updated, improved version of Gould’s graph, again with a couple minor changes from me:
With this updated version, it’s a lot easier to see what’s going on here. The standard deviation of batting averages (of regular players) is much higher before 1900, declines over the course of the 20th century, and then stabilizes. For Gould, this data is a demonstration of the idea that ‘complex systems equilibrate as they improve’ (162).
Gould’s argument is basically that the ‘great’ players of the past were, relative to players of today, bigger outliers in the overall pool of players. The fact that players today aren’t hitting .400 anymore, he argued, shows us that the best players of the past were–at best–no better than the best players of today. As he put it: “The .400 hitters of old were relatively better, but absolutely worse (or equal).”
Gould cites the “profound and general improvement of athletes” as a key contributor (Gould 2004: 157). But he argues that this general improvement has been masked in baseball because subtle adjustments (e.g. rule changes) have been made over time to help maintain consistency in the game. This seems more or less correct.
However, Gould is using baseball here as an analogy for thinking about evolutionary processes, and I think there are some things missing from his argument. Why? Because baseball isn’t just a complex system in the evolutionary biology sense–it’s a complex social and cultural system as well…which means we have to account for other factors and possibilities. Shocking, I know, for a cultural anthropologist to make this kind of argument.
Take Gould’s argument about the overall ‘general improvement’ of athletes over time. This could certainly be read from a perspective that is more focused on evolutionary biology. But there’s a lot of social stuff going on here. The general improvement in baseball since the late 19th century isn’t just about an improvement in physical capacity and ability over time. It’s also about the overall professionalization of the sport itself, which entails a whole range of social, economic, and other factors.
For example, Ty Cobb, who hit .401 in 1922, would have faced pitchers such as Alex Ferguson of the Red Sox. Ferguson, a journeyman pitcher who had a 9-16 record and a 4.31 ERA (this is not great), spent time during the off-season working at the local GE plant as a stock clerk while living with his parents. This kind of thing was pretty common up through the 1970s, even for star players like Walter Johnson, who apparently dug post holes for the Idaho Telephone company when he wasn’t playing baseball.
By the 1980s, when Gould first wrote his essay, the whole situation was very different. Players were making enough money to dedicate themselves, year round, to playing baseball. Gould sort of skips over this somewhat complicated dimension while making his argument about complex systems. I think it makes sense that baseball players are much better athletes overall these days because the vast majority of them today are full-time professionals. This is a decidedly socio-cultural factor that has shaped the kinds of patterns that Gould is trying to explain. It does seem relevant that we haven’t seen any .400 hitters since the sport became more fully professionalized. The last .400 hitters were in the early 1940s. The closest was Tony Gwynn in 1994 when he hit .394–but that was also a strike-shortened season in which teams only played 144 games.
So to me it makes sense that the death of .400 hitting is paradoxically about the overall improvement of the game. Gould is right about that…he just jumps past some of the social and cultural factors at play. But I don’t think this explains everything. I mean, if the sport started to professionalize by the 1970s, what happened between then and the early 1940s? Why weren’t there any .400 hitters in those two decades? Well, I think there were some other broader social shifts in the game itself that help explain what’s going on here. More of that pesky social and cultural stuff! To be continued…