All season long, Luis Arraez has been on the hunt for baseball immortals.
His batting average hovered around the vaunted .400 average, a standard not matched in a major league season since Ted Williams in 1941.
Then, in mid-June, Arraez went three games without a hit. Three games! For him, it was tantamount to a catastrophic drought. His average dropped to .378.
Arraez, 26, reacted excitedly. Against Washington, he scored 5-5. Against Toronto, he had five leads and five more goals. He also kept the charts up in last weekend’s series against Pittsburgh.
Back to the .400 chase, Arraez went.
Major League Baseball’s rule changes, aimed at making the game faster and better, dominated the narrative early in the season. But Arraez has blossomed into a hero who has begun to shape a season to last.
Hitting his singles and soft drives in the largely empty Miami Stadium, he is little known. But if he stays above .400 past the All-Star break, his status will change. The pressure will mount with every blow, as it did with Williams, even at a time when radio broadcasts and the slow spread of daily newspapers played an important role in reporting.
In today’s world, every swing is digitized, instantly streamed around the world, and analyzed by commentators and fans. Arraez will be known far beyond the baseball fan base.
Arraez, a 5ft 10in Venezuelan, is chasing more than just Williams, who finished the 1941 season with a .406 average. In 1947, Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color line, which had been in place since the 19th century. No player has completed a season batting .400 or higher since Major League Baseball became an integrated game.
The pursuit of records has a magnetic way of captivating and captivating us. It will always be like this, always has been.
Think of the ancient Greeks. In Athens of the 6th century B.C. Clocks and stopwatches did not exist in BC, but the Greeks kept records of the unprecedented number of victories of athletes such as Milo of Croton, a wrestler who won gold medals at six Olympic Games.
And just like us today, the ancient Greeks were obsessed with reputation.
“Imagine a world without Twitter, newspapers, or SportsCenter highlights,” said David Lunt, associate professor of history at Southern Utah University. “You just have this reputation, these stories that people tell about you. “Oh my god, you wouldn’t believe what this amazing athlete did.” And there were different ways to commemorate it.”
Poems were written, songs commissioned, statues erected. Everyone knew that an athlete had set the performance limits.
Some things change over time, others don’t. Today, record breakers are celebrated with billion-dollar careers, hundreds of millions of social media followers, and – for the lucky few like Willie Mays and Wayne Gretzky – a statue in front of a stadium.
In February, a jump shot by LeBron James toppled one of basketball’s biggest and most exciting milestones: most points scored in an NBA career — 38,387 — a record held by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar since 1985 and for a long time was considered unbeatable.
Honoring Abdul-Jabbar brings back memories of other sports champions and the records they hold.
Wilt Chamberlain was the most-shot player in the NBA with his 100-point game
Bill Russell’s 11 NBA titles is the most by any player in the league.
Milestones possess a certain magic. They exist on a continuum, celebrating unparalleled excellence while enticing future generations to hunt.
As such, Margaret Court’s record haul of 24 Grand Slam singles titles is reminiscent of Serena Williams’ heartbreaking chase, which faltered at 23, reminiscent of Novak Djokovic, who won his 23rd Slam tournament at this month’s French Open and was at Wimbledon with Court could keep up.
There are records that seem unsurpassable – only to be shattered by the wrecking ball of one rousing, breathtaking performance breakaway. At the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, Bob Beamon set such a record in the long jump, jumping almost two feet over the previous world bests.
Then, in 1991, came Mike Powell, who snatched the mark by jumping 29 feet 4½ inches, two inches over Beamon.
It’s been 32 years and Powell’s performance is still the standard. At present.
Then there are milestones that aren’t real records, but now look like one.
When the subject of the elusive .By the time the 400 mark is reached, one would think that Williams was not only the last to reach that average, but the first. However, you are wrong. Dozens of major league players, including Ty Cobb, reached that standard before Williams.
But Williams and Cobb’s major leagues, and with them their balance sheets, will forever be tainted by the scourge of racism. Therefore, if Arraez continues on his winning streak and hits .400 or more this season, he should be hailed as the first big league player to ever truly reach that mark — an immortal baseball player.
Do you remember Milo of Croton? He is said to have gone to war with the olive crowns he won for his Olympic records – along with a lion skin and a mace that made him look like Hercules.
An important detail of this story is probably the stuff of metaphors, said Heather Reid, a philosophy professor who studies the ancient Greeks and their relationship to sport. The wrestling champion probably didn’t wear his Olympic crowns, which were made out of olive branches in ancient times, for a reason: they crumbled, a reference to life’s ephemerality.
And that points to a fundamental connection between ancient and modern sports. Records, then as now, constitute a “study in the limits of human excellence,” as Reid suggested.
Mortals transcend the boundaries, making them appear like gods for a time. Until someone comes and pushes her off the pedestal. That’s why we’re watching.
In last weekend’s series against Pittsburgh, Arraez’s average shot up to a .401 as he hit singles shot after shot and even hit his third home run of the season. A 1-on-4 win on Sunday put him back up to .399.
If he can pull through the season’s swoons and land over .400, it’ll be time for a statue in front of Miami Stadium. Add a poem, a song and maybe an olive crown.
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