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Ted Williams: Last to .400, among first to face shifts?
- Updated: July 26, 2016
In 1941, Ted Williams batted a remarkable .406. Seventy-five years later, that performance sticks out for two reasons.
Most obviously, no Major Leaguer has reached the .400 plateau since. But Williams’ prowess at the plate that season, combined with an opposing manager’s desperate creativity, also helped establish a strategy that today is increasingly popular and hotly debated.
Over the first four months of the 2016 season, big league teams aemployed a defensive shift in more than 20,000 plate appearances, according to Baseball Info Solutions data available at FanGraphs.com. That puts the league on a pace to shatter last year’s record of 24,486 shifts, continuing a steep upward trend.
This dynamic can be traced back, in part, to Williams. On July 23, 1941, the Red Sox hosted the White Sox at Fenway Park. Williams, who had yet to turn 23 years old, had batted .327 as a rookie and .344 in ’40, and he entered this day at .397, with a 1.208 OPS.
Play MLB.com’s “.406 contest”
Looking for a different way to defend the eventual American League MVP Award runner-up, Chicago manager Jimmy Dykes reportedly set his defense in a way that wouldn’t look out of place against present-day Boston slugger David Ortiz. The third baseman moved toward the shortstop’s usual spot, the shortstop shifted to the right side of second base, and the second baseman played out in short right, with the outfielders also sliding in that direction.
The results were mixed. In his account of the game, the Boston Globe’s Gerry Moore wrote that in one at-bat, “With the White Sox playing Ted in a lopsided manner towards right, the Kid lined a two-bagger into the extreme left-field corner.” But later, according to Moore, Chicago second baseman Bill Knickerbocker threw out Williams at first after fielding a grounder in short right field.
Williams finished 2-for-5, and he did the same the next day against the White Sox. According to Mike Vaccaro of the New York Post, Williams also beat the shift with a bunt down the third-base line, and …
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