In a sport as old as baseball, every day is the anniversary of something. The "This Date in Baseball" file, sent out daily by The Associated Press, used to be a staple as filler on the agate pages of daily newspapers. Such lists remain popular even in the digital age. At ESPN, we get regular lists of anniversaries from the indispensable ESPN Stats & Information. They always send this history-curious hardball fan down all kinds of research rabbit holes.
This season is so unusual that, on a nightly basis, we are seeing things that are unprecedented. We've never had a season start so late or scheduled to be so brief. There are a gaggle of new rules and guidelines. The playoffs will feature the same number of teams that made up the entire major leagues from 1901 to 1960. (And no, Federal League fans, I'm still not calling that a major league.)
All of this is unfolding in real time under the uncertainty of the coronavirus pandemic, which reminds us daily that, while the season could be halted at any point, every game we do get feels like a gift. With so much happening in the present, it's hard to tie the 2020 campaign with all that has come before. But let's try.
This week, the 40th anniversary of an event came and went that I would argue was one of the iconic baseball moments of a generation. That number of years -- 40 -- is startling for me personally, because it was an event in which I was very much invested. Also, one week after it happened, I attended my first major league game in the same stadium where it happened. I'm referring to the real Summer of George, 1980, when my favorite player ascended to a place that no other player has ever reached and stayed in for so long.
The iconic moment happened on Aug. 17, 1980, at Royals Stadium in Kansas City, Missouri. It wasn't about the team. The Royals were already 32 games over .500 and led the American League West by 13 games entering that day. This was right smack in the middle of the franchise's salad days. That night, a Sunday, Kansas City led Toronto 5-3 in the bottom of the eighth, with star closer Dan Quisenberry halfway through a two-inning save.
Yet despite those seemingly calm circumstances, the crowd at the ballpark was in a frenzy, and so was the Royals' dugout. After two quick outs, U.L. Washington had singled to center against the Blue Jays' Ken Schrom. Then Amos Otis had walked, bringing John Wathan to the plate. In the on-deck circle stood the reason for the bedlam: George Brett.
Brett had already walked, singled twice and doubled in the game. His batting average at that moment was .3993. Everyone in the stadium knew it. Everyone in baseball knew it. The hot streak that Brett had been riding since the All-Star break had become the biggest story in baseball. It had become a story that transcended baseball.
"I figured there was no way he was going to walk me," Wathan later said, the details of the moment preserved in "The George Brett Story," a 1981 biography written in medias res by John Garrity. But after Schrom's third pitch missed, the blare of the crowd amped up even higher. Schrom's fourth offering missed badly. "He didn't even come close," Wathan said. "I was very surprised."
With his cheek characteristically bulging with tobacco, Brett strode to the plate in the middle of the uproar. On the scoreboard, his average -- .399 -- was flashed. The anticipation of the moment was prolonged by a pitching change: Toronto manager Bobby Mattick summoned righty Mike Barlow from the bullpen. Barlow had struck out Brett the night before.
After the game, Brett told reporters what was going through his head. "When I got to .399, I said to myself that if I hadn't chased a bad ball last night, I'd be at .400 already. The adrenaline was flowing."
Barlow snuck a fastball over for a strike. The crowd ahhhed. Then he missed low with a sinker. The crowd roared. The third pitch, another sinker down, Brett fouled off and admonished himself because he had pledged to lay off any low ones. "I didn't want to let those 30,000 people down," he said.
He didn't. He rarely did. Barlow's 1-2 pitch caught too much of the plate and Brett lined it into the opposite-field gap, just past left fielder Garth Iorg, who might have misread the drive. The ball bounded off the fence. The three runners on base all raced home. With the crowd in the throes of an ecstasy that it seems only Kansas City fans can reach, Brett found himself on second base. The moment was captured by Kansas City Star photographer Fred Blocher, Brett standing on the bag, his arms raised, batting helmet in his right hand, soaking up the adoration. Brett's average was .401.
After the game, Brett offered a one-word reaction to the moment. "Goosebumps" was all he said.
This season's Brett
All through the summer of 1980, newspapers across the nation ran a daily George Brett .400 tracker. Even The Boston Globe did so, comparing Brett's building numbers to those of the Hub's own Ted Williams in 1941, when the Splendid Splinter became the last player to bat .400. Those trackers are back this season, and while they might be short-lived, in this odd campaign, they are a gift. They are also a lot fancier now.
Colorado's Charlie Blackmon is the player on the spot. Through Wednesday's games, he was hitting .426. The Yankees' DJ LeMahieu is hitting .411 but is out for two or three weeks because of a sprained thumb and soon will lack the number of plate appearances needed to qualify. Qualification, by the way, was a hot topic in the latter stages of Brett's quest four decades ago. We'll get to that. (We also shouldn't overlook the Nationals' Juan Soto, who is at .417 after his even-later-than-the-others start, if only because you can't put anything beyond Soto. If he plays the rest of the way, he should qualify for percentage leaderboards.)
Blackmon, himself, summed up the situation aptly after raising his average to .500 with three hits on Aug. 11. "I don't think .400 is a realistic mark for today's game. The pitching is too good. The stuff is too good. There's more specialization. I don't think it's something that will happen. It's just too far away from the average."
Well, Blackmon knows his math, and that's one way to short-circuit any distracting media crush. Since then, he has hit .232, dropping his average to its current mark. Still, this is something that Blackmon should embrace. Even though we all know that a 60-game .400 average would not be the same as a 154- or 162-game .400 mark, it would still be a special pursuit. It would make the 2020 season memorable for something that is actually good. It could even make batting average cool again. Why not?
We know that even if Blackmon (or LeMahieu or Soto or even Robinson Cano -- check out his Statcast metrics) makes a run at .400, it won't create a Brett-like frenzy. But it would be fun, and that is something in very short supply these days.
Also, what Blackmon and LeMahieu have already done is significant, even if it's only made possible by the season's late start. According to this list put together by esteemed MLB.com researcher and writer Sarah Langs, this year is the latest date a hitter has carried a .400 average into a season since Brett in 1980. Every day that Blackmon or one of his colleagues remains above that mark adds to the feat.
Baseball royalty
When the 1980 season began, Brett was already firmly established as one of the game's biggest stars, though because he toiled in the Midwest (egad!), the East Coast writers often referred to him as underrated. Even in the midst of his magical 1980 run, Chicago Sun-Times columnist Bill Gleason declared that "Brett is [Ted] Williams now" but lamented that Brett had not captured the national acclaim that he was, in fact, about to capture.
That was truly the golden era of Royals baseball, with all due respect to the success of the franchise in the 2010s. Kansas City's .551 aggregate winning percentage from 1976 to 1985 ranked fourth among the 26 clubs, and during those years, the Royals were often described as a model franchise.
And why not? The franchise did not debut until 1969, but it quickly reached the elite. The Royals' 43 postseason games and 18 postseason wins over that span in 1976-85 ranked third behind the Yankees and Dodgers. They won six AL West titles (plus the second-half title in the split 1981 season), two pennants and the franchise's first World Series title. At the gate, only the Dodgers, Phillies, Yankees and Angels drew more fans during that decade. In fact, nearly 3 million more fans attended games at Royals Stadium in those years than showed up across the state at Busch Stadium in St. Louis.
All through that time, Brett was the major drawing card. Among position players who accumulated at least 3,000 plate appearances during that peak decade, Brett ranked second in average (.321), sixth in hits (1,638), first in doubles (342), first in triples (90), second in slugging (.529), 10th in RBIs (841), second in OPS (.913) and second in the Baseball-Reference.com version of WAR (63.2, behind Mike Schmidt's 73.9). He struck out only 352 times while drawing 548 walks.
Still, when the season began, the big story in baseball was looming labor discord. In fact, the players boycotted the last part of spring training, though a number of them -- including Brett -- remained in camp voluntarily to stay in shape. According to the autobiography of MLBPA president Marvin Miller, the players had voted to go on strike on Memorial Day -- May 23 -- if they could not come to an accord with the owners. The owners were rumored to be considering canceling the season if that came to pass.
The preseason news in Kansas City was dominated by salary-related grumbling when news leaked that the Royals were considering rewarding Brett with a lucrative new contract. Otis, a stalwart center fielder, even said that if he wasn't taken care of, after his deal was up in 1981, he was gone.
Beyond the money complaints, star catcher Darrell Porter had left the club during camp to get treatment for what was then described as alcoholism, as the addiction issues that eventually claimed Porter's life played out very much in the public eye. On top of all of this, the Royals were playing for a new, low-key manager in Jim Frey, one of Earl Weaver's coaches in Baltimore. He had replaced the bombastic and polarizing Whitey Herzog, who saw Brett as the game's best player and claimed to have taught him how to fish and drink whiskey. Brett loved Herzog. Some of his teammates did not.
The Royals were trying to reclaim their AL West throne after having their three-year reign atop the division ended by the California Angels in 1979, even though Brett hit .329 and became the first player since Willie Mays in 1957 to surpass 20 doubles, triples and homers in the same season. With all of these things swirling around the club, a return to the top seemed to be a tall task.
April 22, 1980
The Royals knocked off the Blue Jays 7-2, evening their record at 6-6. Brett went 0-for-4 against three Toronto pitchers, dropping his early season average to .209. The next day, he grounded out in his first at-bat, dropping his mark to .205, but then rang out three hits against the Jays, including a double and a triple. The climb had begun, and Brett was relieved.
"I've been down on myself all season," Brett told reporters. "But when I saw the .205, I guess that was the lowest I've been. I was hoping somebody else would make an out so I wouldn't have the lowest batting average on the team."
The highest-profile runs at .400 since Williams have all taken different shapes.
In 1977, Rod Carew caught fire in June and had his average up to .411 by the beginning of July. He fell off very gradually after that, falling as low as .374 near the end of August. He finished strong, ending up at .388, but that season-ending mark was his best since July 21.
In 1993, John Olerud peaked at .458 on May 1 and immediately slumped, falling to .378 by May 12. He got hot again, though, and went on to end every day over .400 from July 24 to Aug. 2. He was still at .382 at the end of August but hit just .269 in September to finish at .363.
In 1994, Tony Gwynn reached .419 in the middle of May, fell off, but kept his average around and above .380 until catching fire again after the All-Star break. He hit .423 from that point until Aug. 11, pushing his average to .394. Then, of course, a great season was snuffed by the strike that cost us Gwynn's run at .400, a multipronged assault on Roger Maris' home run record and what could have been the only championship team in the history of the Montreal Expos. It might have in fact cost us the Montreal Expos. Anyway, the lowest average that Gwynn had at the end of any game all season was .300, on April 15.
In 1997, Larry Walker started off as if he had broken baseball. After getting four hits on April 22 -- the 17th anniversary of Brett's nadir in 1980 -- Walker was hitting .507. He dipped below .400 with an 0-for-9 showing in a doubleheader at Wrigley Field on July 19 and steadily declined until his season-ending .366 mark, his lowest since the first week of the season.
In 2000, Nomar Garciaparra had a very consistent season, hitting .372, an average that peaked at .403 on July 20, in the first game of a doubleheader. He went 0-for-5 in the second game and never got back to .400.
None of these memorable runs had the same kind of narrative shape as Brett's in 1980. None of these players got as hot for as long as Brett did that season.
Critical conditions
Blackmon has a great point about the challenge of hitting .400 in today's game, even in a season this truncated. So far in 2020, MLB teams are averaging 4.63 pitchers per game. In 1980, the comparable figure was 2.56. The funny thing about that latter number: It was used throughout Brett's run as a chief reason why he would not finish over .400. In 1941, teams had averaged 1.93 pitchers per game.
Of course, the differences go well beyond that. Everything in the game has gone away from batting average. Team evaluators don't care about it. Some players still do, but many don't. Shifts cut down on average, as does the recent emphasis at getting the ball in the air. Offenses are geared toward power hitting rather than gap-to-gap hitting and moving runners around. The avatar for all of these trends is the strikeout rate. In 1941, pitchers struck out 3.6 batters per nine innings. By 1980, that number was up to 4.8. In 1994, it was 6.2. So far in 2020, it's an all-time high 9.0.
The end result is that batting average has never been harder to come by. Though numbers have been picking up of late, the league-level batting average has been quoted far and wide during the season's opening weeks. Through Wednesday, it was at .241, which would be the lowest mark since .237 in 1968 -- the famous Year of the Pitcher.
It's actually worse than that because for the first time, every team can deploy a designated hitter. If you remove pitcher hitting from the equation, the league batting average in 2020 remains at .241. But the league average in 1968 jumps to .245. There has never been a season with a non-pitcher batting average as low as it is right here, right now.
Thus Blackmon is absolutely right, even if he might be overlooking the advantages that come with playing half of his games in Coors Field. For a player to hit .400 in 2020, he'll have to beat the MLB mark by (as of now) 159 points. That number in 1941 was 129 points for Williams. In 1980, it was 132 points for Brett.
May 22, 1980
Imagine an alternate universe where the players do end up walking out on May 23 and the owners really do wipe out the season. After going 0-for-6 on May 21 in a 14-inning home loss to Oakland, Brett was still mired in a down season, with his average at .247. The strike deadline was looming. Brett's 1980 average could have been forever frozen where it was, far short of .300, much less .400.
Instead, Miller and Ray Grebey, chief negotiator for management, reached a settlement after an all-night bargaining session. Thus, the storm clouds that eventually engulfed the 1981 season had, for the time being, been blown away. Just like that, the headlines around the baseball media-scape began to refocus to events on the field.
In Kansas City, the Royals recovered from their dispiriting loss the night before to trounce Matt Keough and the A's 10-3. Brett had two hits, including his fifth triple.
"Maybe we ought to call more strikes," Brett said after the game.
Middle West icon
George Brett was already my favorite player before he almost hit .400, but in my part of the world, I was not alone. Kids wanted to play third base in Little League because of Brett. All through that era, a spate of babies were born and were named after the beloved No. 5. Since he rose to prominence in the late 1970s, Brett has been the icon of baseball in that part of the country.
I would argue this: Few, if any, players have hung on to face-of-the-franchise status longer than Brett has for the Royals. While that's a subjective assessment, it can perhaps be illustrated empirically.
Brett is K.C.'s all-time leader in bWAR, with 88.6. That's 1.89 times as many wins above replacement as franchise runner-up Kevin Appier, who had 47. Only two franchises have a career leader with a higher ratio over their No. 2. The Twins/Senators' all-time leader is Walter Johnson, whose 164.5 bWAR is 2.58 times that of Rod Carew (63.8). Of course, it's not clear that the Big Train ever stepped foot in the state of Minnesota, so it's a stretch to call him the face of the Minneapolis franchise.
The only real challenger for Brett in this regard would be the gone-way-too-soon Tony Gwynn, whose 69.2 bWAR is 2.16 times that of what Dave Winfield put up during his time in San Diego. Gwynn died in 2014. The Padres have never had another player who matched Gwynn's stature in San Diego, and of course he was raised in that city. That sole-face status for the Pads could change in the years to come, as Fernando Tatis Jr. cements his superstar status, though that would entail the Padres locking him up for the long haul.
Brett has arguably been the face of Kansas City baseball since 1975. Perhaps the best-ever Angel, Mike Trout, could catch him in, say, 2060 or so. But to have one player lord over a franchise for this long is, to say the least, historically unique.
June 10, 1980
Brett started to hit after his early struggles, especially in the weeks after his 27th birthday on May 15, 1980. The Royals began to pile up wins and Porter rejoined the team, declaring to reporters that it wasn't just alcohol but drugs for which he was seeking treatment. This was a bold declaration at the time, when the stigma of drug addiction was much stronger than it is now.
"I am now beginning the biggest challenge of my life," Porter said. Soon after, a story hit the wires before a road trip that would take the Royals through the media hubs of Chicago, New York and Boston.
"When we go into Chicago and New York, they'll eat him alive," Brett said, and teammate Hal McRae offered similar sentiments.
They were wrong. When Porter first stepped to the plate at Comiskey Park, he received a warm ovation from the supposedly rowdy South Side fans. In New York, he homered off Ron Guidry, and to his astonishment, the Yankee Stadium crowd gave him a standing ovation. Unfortunately, it was just the current phase of an issue Porter lived with until he died. For the time being, though, the spotlight was off him and on to his quickly heating-up teammate.
Over 18 games from May 22 to June 10, Brett hit .447 with six homers, raising his average to .337. The Royals won 14 of those games, improving their record to 34-20 and opening a six-game lead in the division. Then the bugaboo of Brett's career reared its hideous head: He got injured.
The timing was terrible. Brett's two-run homer on June 8 helped the Royals cap a rally at Texas for their sixth straight win. Rumors were spreading that the Royals were about to finally lavish Brett with that big contract. Brett was upbeat. The next day, Brett's pal Herzog was hired by the Cardinals to replace Ken Boyer as their manager.
"It's fantastic," Brett said. "They're getting a great man."
"He won't last long," Otis said, before backtracking to at least wish Herzog well.
After an off day, Brett started a series at Cleveland on June 10 with a mammoth home run in his first at-bat against Len Barker. In the third inning of that game, he walked, then stole second base. But on the slide into the bag, Brett injured some ligaments in his right ankle. Papers across the country carried a wire photo of Brett being carried off the field on a stretcher with a pained look on his face.
Brett did not play again for a month.
Small-sample heroes
If Blackmon plays all 60 games for Colorado, at his current pace he would end up with 257 plate appearances, or a little over half the minimum number of trips needed to qualify for the batting title in a normal season. Over the course of baseball history, there really aren't any examples of a small-sample .400 hitter.
Since 1901, every hitter who has finished with at least a .380 average -- and reached at least Blackmon's likely maximum level of plate appearances -- ultimately qualified for the batting crown. Except one. In 1939, Don Padgett -- then Mickey Owen's backup at catcher for the Cardinals -- hit .399 over 257 plate appearances. That's right: Padgett nearly hit .400 over the exact same number of trips to the dish as Blackmon is on pace to compile.
In his last plate appearance that season, Padgett was intentionally walked as a pinch hitter by the Cubs' Claude Passeau. We'll never know what would have happened if Passeau had pitched to Padgett, but if he had gotten a hit, Padgett would have batted .402 in 1939.
There is a point to be made here related to Blackmon and the arbitrary nature of qualifying minimums. (Blackmon of course should qualify by 2020 standards, which are far lower than typical season minimums.) The standard for qualifying for the batting crown in Padgett's day was 100 games played. He played in 92 and thus would not have qualified. Still, it was close enough that any mention of the last NL hitter to hit .400 would at least have to acknowledge him.
As it is, Padgett's tale merited a retelling in a piece published on the Hall of Fame's website. So who's to say how a .400 season by Blackmon or someone else would be remembered? Let's find out.
Incidentally, the last NL hitter to hit .400 was Bill Terry, who hit .401 for John McGraw's Giants in 1930, when the league average in the Senior Circuit was .303. Still, 50 years later, Terry had the temerity to dismiss Brett's quest for immortality in one of the all-time-great old-man rants. First, he didn't like it that Brett missed so many games, but there was so much more than that.
"[The missed games] should disqualify him," an 82-year-old Terry told the New York Daily News in 1980. "It's not like playing 154 games. They don't play baseball like we used to. There's more bad hitters than good hitters now. They swing for the fences all the time."
Later in the season, as it looked more and more likely that Brett really would hit .400, columnists across the land took to tracking his plate appearances as closely as his average. It stirred a debate at the highest levels of baseball: If Brett were to fall a few at-bats short, how should it be handled? This conversation lasted deep into September, when a committee of experts held a meeting to discuss the matter. Everyone had an opinion. Ultimately, it was decided not to add the missing appearances to Brett's line to allow him to qualify, as some suggested.
Brett finished with 515 plate appearances to render the debate moot. Still, that's another point to consider for looming Blackmon detractors. There were many pundits in 1980 who thought Brett might hit .400 precisely because the missed time made his sample smaller, but as long as it wasn't too small -- as in not qualifying -- all would be well. That same reasoning seems as if it won't apply for any .400 hitter in 2020.
July 10, 1980
Brett's transformation into a legend began immediately upon his return from the ankle injury, which had kept him in the hospital for a week. During the month off, he was elected as the starting third baseman for the AL All-Star team for a fifth straight season, though he did not play in the game. In one of many off-kilter media clips from Brett's year, during that month a paper in Washington polled the wives of Mariners players about who was the most handsome player in the game. Brett came in fifth, behind Jim Palmer, Rick Honeycutt (who was on the Mariners), Jim Rice and Bucky Dent.
Apparently the criteria wasn't entirely clear. "We weren't sure what you wanted," Honeycutt's wife, Debbie, told the reporter doing the polling. "We didn't know if you wanted it from the neck up, or the neck down."
Back on the field, Brett became an entirely different kind of hot. He homered in his first game back, on July 10, the first game after the All-Star break. Over his first week back, Brett went 17-for-29. Quite suddenly and quite shockingly, baseball was a week into its second half and Brett was hitting .374.
The AL squad in the All-Star Game that year was managed by Baltimore's Weaver, who selected Frey as one of his coaches. The Royals were due to play Baltimore after the break, and Frey assured his old boss that Brett would be back in the lineup.
"He's trying to get me to throw Brett curveballs," Weaver said, adding that Frey would take that news back to Brett. "Those curveballs will wind up in the water fountain in Kansas City."
Brett was hitting the ball so hard that it actually cost Weaver his best player. On July 14, Brett hit a bad-hop grounder with such ferocity at Orioles star Eddie Murray that it fractured the orbital bone around Murray's right eye and sent the future Hall of Famer to the injured list during what was shaping up as an epic race with the Yankees in the AL East. Murray had played in 444 straight games.
Brett was just getting started. "When I was hurt, I spent eight days in the hospital," Brett said. "I spent a lot time thinking on hitting and fundamentals. It's paid off."
Brett capped that big first week back with four hits at Fenway Park on July 16, then told reporters after the game that "hitting is not easy for me." As if to prove his point, he went 0-for-4 the next day against Boston's John Tudor.
One day later in New York, in front of his mentor, legendary hitting coach Charlie Lau, Brett got back on track with four hits at Yankee Stadium. The last of those hits came against New York's Ed Figueroa, a former 20-game winner who twice had finished in the top 10 in AL Cy Young balloting. Brett hammered a lot of pitchers, but no one got it worse than Figueroa. Brett was 25-for-42 against him in his career.
That four-hit outburst began what turned into a 30-game hitting streak, during which Brett became the biggest sensation in sports. By the end of July, he was hitting .390 and had finally landed the long-rumored contract that would pay him around $1 million per year over five years, including deferred payments. Imagine what that deal would look like now.
At the beginning of August, the first of the "Will Brett hit .400?" articles began to appear nationwide. Around this time, Tigers manager Sparky Anderson declared that he was done pitching to Brett, saying, "I'm gonna walk him. He'll look pretty good with 600 walks next year."
There was also a lot of MVP chatter at this time, and not everyone thought Brett was the clear choice. Some thought K.C. teammate Willie Wilson was the real driving force of the Royals, and Wilson was having an epic season of his own. Wilson eventually finished with 230 hits, with more than 100 from each side of the plate.
In New York, the popular pick was Reggie Jackson. Among the Reggie supporters was Reggie himself. "Jackson," Jackson told The Sporting News when asked whom he'd pick. He then went on to list his top four, none of which was Brett. Within a month, even New York writers were on the Brett bandwagon. Brett eventually edged Jackson for the award, earning 17 first-place votes to Jackson's five.
Brett's hitting streak ended at Texas on Aug. 19 at the hands of Jon Matlack, though the Royals scored three in the ninth to win the game. During the 30-game spree, Brett's numbers were simply not plausible, but they happened. Over what in 2020 would be exactly half a season, Brett hit .467, with 57 hits in the 30 games. If you take the hit total and the 42 runs he drove in during the streak and project them over 162 games, you get 308 hits and 227 RBIs.
The apex
Right now, the calendar is cluttered with the 40th anniversaries of things Brett did in 1980.
If the iconic moment of Brett's season was the bases-clearing double on Aug. 17 that put him over .400 for the first time, the high-water mark occurred a few days later. After a short downturn dipped his average to .397, Brett went 5-for-5 in the first game of a road trip at County Stadium in Milwaukee. Two times during the game, Brett received a standing ovation from Brewers fans. When the dust settled, Brett was hitting .407.
That game was played on Aug. 26. At the close of play on Aug. 29, Brett's average stood at .404. Here's the reason I mention that date. Because this season is 60 games long, Fangraphs put together a neat tool on its website where you can look up performances over 60-game stretches through history.
Brett's .469 average over his previous 60 games, starting May 30 and ending on Aug. 29, 1980, is the highest ever. But of course, no one looks at batting average anymore, right? Well how about this: Brett's 6.5 fWAR during that span is also the best ever, better than a 60-game spree by Barry Bonds in 2001 during which Bonds hit 31 home runs.
No one has been hotter for longer than George Brett was in 1980.
"He's a helluva hitter," Teddy Ballgame himself told Red Smith in a syndicated piece around that time, after Williams had initially ignored the furor and went off to fish in Canada. "He's strong and he's a gutty guy. I hope he makes it."
This was a decidedly different note than Williams had sounded earlier in the month, when he grumpily said he hoped Brett would hit .400, "so writers would ask him who the next .400 will be."
Brettmania
Well, if you've read this far, you know Brett didn't make it. He came close. He got hurt again in September -- a hand this time -- and sat out 11 days. When he returned, he put up three straight two-hit games, and after a 13-3 win over the A's on Sept. 19, Brett was hitting .3995 -- which most would round up to .400, though some disagree that would make someone a .400 hitter. (Probably including Williams, who would have had a rounded-up .400 average in 1941 if he had not played that last-day doubleheader and gotten six hits to finish at .406.) The latest day on which Brett was above .400 was Sept. 4, when he was at .401.
The media crush around Brett that began in August was unlike anything he or the team could have prepared for. National magazines, including news publications like Time and Newsweek, poured in from every corner. After his five-hit game at Milwaukee, Brett said he answered questions for so long that he missed the team bus back to the hotel. Everyone wanted a piece of Brett and he tried to give everyone what they wanted, saying time and again that he didn't feel any pressure.
In a large swath of the middle of the continent, where I was growing up and at which Kansas City was the center, the summer of 1980 was full-blown Brettmania. As in 2020, it was an election year, and "George Brett for President" bumper stickers proliferated. At a stop in K.C. during his reelection campaign, President Jimmy Carter exchanged bumper stickers with Brett during a photo op. Dick Young, the cranky columnist in New York, complained how some guy in Britain kept calling him up to ask how Brett was doing. The Royals signed Brett's older brother, Ken, and that became a story. Brett was everywhere.
"It's becoming a joke," Brett told The Kansas City Star. "It really is."
Years later, Brett admitted that the moment did in fact get to him. His biggest mistake in trying to hit .400 was that, at some point, he started trying to hit .400. He didn't. He fell five hits short. He always joked in the decades afterward how his famously stern father, Jack, had said, "You couldn't get five more frickin' hits?"
No, instead Brett had to settle for what came to him. He had to settle for a season that boggles the mind. Over 117 games, he hit .390/.454/.664 with 24 homers and 118 RBIs. He drew 58 walks, but here's the real testament to how good and how feared Brett was: He struck out only 22 times in 515 plate appearances and was walked intentionally 16 times. It was almost as common for him to be intentionally walked as it was for him to whiff.
"I never thought I'd be this good," Brett told one writer. No one thought it was false humility. "I never thought I'd hit .300."
In today's analytics-fused approach to baseball, it never has been better to be a baseball fanatic. There is nothing you cannot know. For years, the old measures have been pushed toward obsolescence in favor of more revealing measures, none of which diminish what Brett did during his career.
Sometimes those complaints about the old-school stats are tiresome at best and condescending at the worst. There will always be a place for old measures, understood in their proper context, because they are the ties that bind the generations of baseball together. We can't go back and see what Brett's exit velocity was in 1980 -- though Eddie Murray would be the first to tell you it was probably pretty high. But we do know that Brett almost hit .400, closer than anyone except Gwynn, who never got a chance to finish his quest.
Analytics or not, short season or not, a run for .400 by Blackmon, LeMahieu or anyone else would be special. It would tie this unprecedented season to some very special history. That's worth getting excited about, even if Blackmon himself understandably wants to keep the quest at arm's length. It's worth getting excited about even if it only serves to remind us of Williams and Brett and Carew and Gwynn, who provided us so much great drama in the quests of summers past. It's worth getting excited about even if there are those who might want to say, "It's only batting average."
A .400 season never did come to Brett. What came to Brett instead was what the poet Archibald MacLeish had written what came for his compatriots in literary Paris of the 1920s, titans like Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot and James Joyce -- fame. Fame came to George Brett, as it had for Williams and Carew before him, and Gwynn after him. It was enough fame to mark a player as the icon of baseball for an entire generation of an entire region.
Forty years later, Brett's quest hardly looks like a failure because it came up short. It looks like one of the great, slowly unfolding triumphs in baseball history. Besides, now that Williams is no longer with us, he'll get his wish: If Blackmon carries his quest deep into September, it'll be Brett's phone lighting up with comment seekers.
Brett might not have hit .400, but his 1980 season is synonymous with the feat, perhaps his entire career. Whether that would hold true for a .400 batter in 2020 is an open question, but wouldn't it be great to have a chance to answer it?