Posted on 08/03/2005 8:34:12 AM PDT by newgeezer
That's a very good question -- I don't know exactly how MLB computes the minimum requirement, but for some reason I think it's based on 3 or 3.1 plate appearances for each game the team plays during a season. For a 162-game season, that comes to around 485-500 plate appearances. Gwynn finished the 1996 season with about 490, so he was fairly close.
And is this feat unprecedented in MLB history?
As far as I know, this only happened once before -- when Pittsburgh's Bill Madlock won the National League batting title in 1981. I believe this almost happened in 1980 in the American League, when George Brett hit .390 but missed so many games due to injury that he barely met the requirement for minimum plate appearances.
Despite the great success of my Yankees in the last ten years, I've never paid a dime to see a major league game ever since that disgraceful end of the 1994 season.
Ted Williams would have won a batting title that way in 1954, except back then they were more rigid about minimum plate appearance requirements. Bobby Avila got it instead. I think it was another 20 years before they altered the rules for awarding batting championships to the way we have now.
Perhaps the most remarkable all-time statistic that nobody ever talks about is Joe Sewell's career record of one strikeout for every 62+ at-bats. He struck out only 114 times in 14 seasons, including his incredible 1925 season in which he struck out only 4 times in nearly 700 plate appearances.
Thanks for clarifying that. So this type of thing may have happened a few times before they changed the rules to allow that hypothetical adjustment to a player's batting average to determine if he won a batting title.
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