Twelve years ago, I rather brilliantly stumbled upon this fact:
Ted Williams's two MVP Awards and two Triple Crowns came in four different years. Twice, Williams won the Triple Crown, but not the MVP; both years that he won the MVP, he didn't win the Triple Crown. Wtf?
And now we read that during his historic .406 season he may have actually hit .413? Yes, since sacrifice flies were accounted for differently that year:
So that leaves us wondering about 1941 in particular, when Ted Williams hit .406 with no sacrifice bunts but an unknown number of sac flies. Thanks to a full perusal of Retrosheet’s 1941 Red Sox game logs, I was able to search for “Williams flies” in each play-by-play account of a game in which he recorded an RBI.
It turns out that Williams had eight sacrifice flies in 1941. Had these been counted as non-appearances, instead of outs, his season’s at bats would have been diminished from 456 to 448 — and his batting average would have been not .406 (0.40570175438) but instead .413 (0.41294642857).
Not so fast, buddy.
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