Strokes Of Luck

To be hitting .400, even two months into a season, is an act of arrogance. A batter mocks the game by operating that long in a zone where charts on hitters' weaknesses and defensive shifts and sliders have no apparent application. Until this season only eight men had carried such an average through June 15 in all the years since Ted Williams's .406 in 1941 made him the last man to bat .400 for a season. To even flirt with that stat, as sacrosanct as 56 or 1.12 in baseball numerology, reveals the kind of hubris that, in mythology anyway, invites destruction.

Ten years have passed since a hitter, Rod Carew, last demonstrated such bravado well into June. Now there's someone in each league doing just that—the Toronto Blue Jays' John Olerud, who at week's end was batting .401 and, despite a 25-game hitting streak, was slipping perilous I close lo mortality will) each 1-for-3 night, and the Colorado Rockies' Andres Galarraga, who had inspired a virulent case of Rocky Mountain Fever among fans in Denver with a mile-high .430.

They are odd additions to the list of June's .400 hitters, neither of them arrogant, both of them careful not to anger baseball's gods. Neither is gifted in the ways of Carew, the one player of recent vintage for whom carrying a .400 average into mid-June was not a kind of blasphemy: He did it four times—in 1974, '75 and '77 with the Minnesota Twins and in '83 with the California Angels. Neither will beat out bunts, as Carew did, or handle the bat the way he did. Neither will swing at a pitchout, as Carew once did during his '77 run, daring all of baseball to try to stifle him. Neither, in fact, will hit .400 for the season.

And everybody knows it. "Is it a miracle the Cat's hitting .400?" asks Rocky manager Don Baylor of Galarraga, who is known as Big Cat because of his grace at first base. "No. It's a miracle he's hitting .300."

Baylor, the man who had the biggest hand in reclaiming Galarraga's declining career, has been working almost as hard to dampen expectations as he did to open the Big Cat's batting stance. Galarraga, after all, hit .246 over the last four seasons. Even when he seemed to be inching up on stardom by hitting .302 with 29 home runs for the Expos in 1988, he still led the league in strikeouts. Baylor loves the Big Cat, a gentle bear of a man who likes to paint landscapes in the off-season. But Baylor, who was a teammate of Carew's in California, also knows there's something wrong with this picture. "That .406," he tells the Colorado customers, "is real safe."

It's not just baseball's recent history that teaches us that, although the evidence is pretty conclusive (boxes, pages 24 and 26). Only one of the eight men on the post-1941 list had a .400 average heading into the final month of the season—the Kansas City Royals' George Brett, who finished at .390 in '80. All fell to earth, although none too precipitously; only Carew, in one of his four runs, ended up under .350 for the year, at .339 in '83.

Baylor can only smile when Denver statisticians approach him with impossible numbers. What would it take for Galarraga to hit .400? Well, one of these numbers men told Baylor one day last week, it would take an 0-for-17 slump. In his long career Baylor has seen hysteria like this before. He knows that Galarraga, though reborn, is not the second coming.

True, the pitching this season is diluted by expansion, and Baylor, whose staff is the worst in baseball, should know that better than anybody. "In my day there were a lot of three-and four-man pitching staffs," he says. "I mean three and four good pitchers." In Galarraga's and Olerud's day it is difficult to locate a rotation besides those of the Atlanta Braves and the Philadelphia Phillies that doesn't seriously drop off after the No. 1 starter.

But while that might encourage hope for another .400 season, other factors will certainly prevent a year such as Williams had more than a half century ago. The Kid might have had to deal with The Shift from time to time, but he didn't have to cope with the constant charting, the defensive structure that managers routinely call into place now. "And can you imagine the pressure there'd be nowadays," says Baylor, "the press conferences that would be held after every game? If a guy is hitting .400 in August...." Baylor remembers when Reggie Jackson had 37 homers at the All-Star break in 1969 and was so haunted by the media he came down with hives. Reggie! "And the national media back then," Baylor reminds us, "was not what it is today."

Olerud (SI, May 10) is getting a double dose of the media already. Baseball Weekly and Maclean's, a Canadian newsweekly, hit him with a binational one-two last week. So far he has remained remarkably unruffled. "I don't know if he's excitable enough to notice all the fuss that would be made later in the year if he took a run at .400," said one Toronto teammate.