19, 60 and .400: Finding Tony Gwynn’s best stretch
Few hitters in the last eight decades have challenged Ted Williams for new membership in the .400 Club, and none more credibly than Tony Gwynn.
In fact, Mr. Padre was only heating up when his best effort ended at .394 on August 11, 1994, as he hit .423 after the All-Star break and .475 that August.
Major League Baseball announced a return-to-play plan Tuesday night, intending to set a 60-game regular season schedule beginning July 23 or 24 pending a Players Association review. Among a litany of rule changes, health protocols and preventative measures, the mind wanders to what could be accomplished when individual games and hot streaks carry more weight.
Does this make 2020 the best chance to chase .400? Which is to say nothing of its “legitimacy” or an asterisk in the record book; rather, could it be done? Difficult as it may be to sustain such a pace over 162 games, surely an elite hitter could catch fire over a few weeks and defy the odds.
And yet only one qualified player in the decade prior even topped .350 — Josh Hamilton’s .359 clip in 2010 — and 16 years have passed since the batting champions in both leagues bested the mark. Which brings us back to Gwynn.
In the traditional sense, he clears the bar easily, but it also reinforces how steep such a climb would be today. He is one of just seven players, Williams included, who carried a .400 average through a season’s first 60 games in the past 80 years. All but one are in the Hall of Fame.
With that box checked, it inspired a search for the best 60-game stretch of Gwynn’s career. How high did he go, and for how long? Using a formula that extrapolated a rolling average over 2,440 games’ worth of data, this is the final result:
The X-axis begins in 1983, taking its first data point from Gwynn’s 54 games as a rookie plus his first six of the next season. The Y-axis spans averages between .240 and .440 for the sake of readability.
More impressive than the four spikes above .400 is the time between them, comprising a run of four straight batting titles. From August 1, 1993, to May 14, 1994, Gwynn batted .427 with a .462 on-base percentage, .515 slugging percentage and the extreme endpoints only he could produce: 102 hits and nine strikeouts over 260 plate appearances.
Although the average hovers around or above .400 for weeks at a time, there is no overlap between the distinct peaks. A few other strong stretches…
.418 from June 16, 1994 to May 3, 1995 — .479 OBP, .573 SLG, 97 hits
.411 from July 30, 1995 to April 10, 1996 — .452 OBP, .506 SLG, 99 hits
.416 from May 16, 1997 to July 24, 1997 — .459 OBP, .617 SLG, 101 hits
Gwynn never batted worse than .245 over any 60-game stretch of his 20-year career; and he had more instances of hitting .410 or greater over 60 games than he did .260 or below. Even in the twilight of his career, Gwynn managed to recapture the magic and put together a run of .396 from May 19, 2000, to August 12, 2001.
So with a shortened season on the horizon, hitting .400 won’t be any easier, let alone looking the part as Tony Gwynn did along the way.
