Circumstances make a career -- a man being at the right place at the right time with the right material. Circumstances can make a .400 hitter. Some years, for example, might be a little better than others for pitching, almost imperceptibly better. Then the pitching might go down and the hitting creep up.

RELATED EXCERPT » The Science of Hitting by Ted Williams

In 1941 I hit .406 for the Boston Red Sox. No one had hit .400 in the major leagues for eleven years before that, not since Bill Terry, and no one has hit .400 again, and I suppose you can find students of the game who say it will never happen again. But there were times when it could have happened. Rod Carew came close a couple times, and George Brett came close once, too. Now it seems that Don Mattingly and Wade Boggs have a shot and I wish one of them would do it so people would quit bugging me about it and I can fish in peace. I think hitting .400 is a big deal, but not that big a deal. I could have done it myself in 1957. I came within five hits of .400 that year. What's five hits? I was thirty-nine years old, aging and aching. There had to be among a season's collection of groundballs at least five leg hits for a younger Ted Williams.

Certainly 1957 appeared to be a year for the batter. Stan Musial hit .351, and he was thirty-six years old. Mickey Mantle hit .365 that year, the best year of his life, and maybe that was his .400 season.

In 1941 there were a lot of big-name pitchers in the American League -- Lefty Gomez, Red Ruffing, Dutch Leonard, Tommy Bridges, Bob Feller, Ted Lyons, Johnny Allen, Bobo Newsom -- and they might have been at their best, but who is to say?

Lyons was tough and got tougher the more you faced him, because he'd learn about you by playing those little pitcher-batter thinking games, and he'd usually outthink you. I know as a rookie when the guys were telling me about the pitchers they would come to Lyons and they'd say, "Well, he's not real fast, but he's sneaky fast," and "His curve is hittable, but he gets it in good spots," and "You've got to watch his change up," and "He's got a knuckleball," and "The one thing you can't do, you can't guess with the son of a gun." That first year I hit Lyons pretty good, but the second year he struck me out twice on fastballs in situations where I thought he would not dare throw a fastball, and he knew I was thinking he wouldn't, so he threw it anyway. Put a little extra on it. Out I went, still looking for a curve. Lyons was a smart pitcher.

But in 1941 Lyons was forty years old and you'd have to think he was over the hump. So was Harder, and Schoolboy Rowe had hurt his arm, and maybe Red Ruffing and Lefty Gomez were not at their best. Bob Feller was at the top of his game, though, and Johnny Allen, and we were seeing Trout and Benton and Virgil Trucks. Hal Newhouser didn't get going good until later. He was wild at first, and a fiery guy. You would hit one off him and it was like you had taken his blood. He'd give you that rotten stare. He didn't think anybody was supposed to hit Newhouser. He became a beautiful pitcher, nice effortless style, fine fastball, pretty to watch. Newhouser had everything. Cronin always said he would have won in any era.

There was some great batting done that year. Joe DiMaggio hit safely in fifty-six straight games. A guy you probably never heard of, Cecil Travis, had a hell of a year -- .359 -- and never had another like it. It was one of those years. I think, surely, to hit .400 you have to be an outstanding hitter having everything go just right, and in my case the hitter was a guy who lived to hit, who worked at it so hard he matured at the bat at a time when he was near his peak physically. The peaks met.

It was a simple formula. Choose any of the noted hitters, and none of them hit any more balls, swung a bat in practice any more times than Theodore Samuel Williams. Now, you can be a great athlete, and you can go to sleep on the bench when you should be watching the pitcher. Watch him warm up and you might pick up a clue; maybe he'll give away a pitch, or throw one he hasn't used before. You might see if he's as fast as usual, or how his curve is breaking. Pick your nose, scratch your ass and it all goes by, and you won't know enough about hitting until you're twenty-eight or twenty-nine years old, and then it'll probably be too late.

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