Can there be a player who inherits the genealogy of ‘the last 40% hitter’?
Luis Araez (26, Miami Marlins) is challenging the record for the first time in 82 years.
Araez played a big role in the game against the Kansas City Royals on the 6th (Korean time) with 3 hits and 2 RBIs in 4 at-bats, leading the team to a 9-6 victory.
As a result, Araez’s batting average rose to a whopping 3099 (83 hits in 208 at-bats). He is running ahead of the combined batting team in both major leagues.
He is the only player who can challenge the 400 batting average this season. Bo Bisset (Toronto Blue Jays), who is second in batting average, is batting . Araez’s ‘strange’ high batting average disproves that it is an individual skill, not a league trend.
In 2019, while with the Minnesota Twins, Araez played just 16 games in Triple-A before jumping to the big leagues. Hae Hae played 92 games and was the starting second baseman for the Minnesota Twins. Since then, he has played an active role as a utility player representing the team despite suffering from his injury.
Eventually, last year, he won the American League (AL) batting title (batting average of 3016), beating Shohei Ohtani (LA Angels) and even winning the Silver Slugger.
This year, when he moved to Miami in the National League (NL) through a trade, his potential literally exploded. In April, he became the protagonist of the first hit for the cycle (cycling hit) in the history of the club, and has been showing off a sense of hitting that overwhelms the league ever since. He is a young altercation still growing.
If Araez continues his batting pace and wins the batting champion for two consecutive years, he will become the first player in the history of modern baseball (since the 1900s) to move leagues and take first place in batting in consecutive seasons.
The last 400 hitter in major league history was Ted Williams in 1941. At the time, Williams’ performance was a batting average of . 406 (185 hits in 456 at-bats), 37 homers, 120 RBIs, and an OPS (on-base percentage + slugging percentage) of 1.287. If the sacrifice fly is counted separately as it is now, the adjusted batting average will be .401.안전놀이터
Williams, who had a batting average of over 30% until his retirement season, was famous as an ‘arrogant genius’. The defensive method devised to stop him is ‘Shift’.
Miami has played a total of 61 games so far. Excluding Araez and Williams himself (1948), there were a total of 7 players who challenged Williams by surpassing .400 batting average in 61 games in the major leagues. In 2008, Chipper Jones (.418) had the highest batting average, followed by Larry Walker (1997, .416), Paul O’Neill (1994), and Rod Curlew (1983, more than 4.100). Stan Musial (1948, 4/8), Tony Gwynn (1997, 4/5) and Roberto Alomar (1996, 3/9) follow.