Ted Williams: The Last .400 Hitter

By 4Baseball Staff · November 5, 2026 · 10 min read

Ted Williams hit .406 in 1941, finished with a .482 on-base percentage and 521 home runs, and lost nearly five seasons to military service. The career in phases, with the numbers that explain why.

Ted Williams hit .406 in 1941, and no one in the major leagues has hit .400 since. He did it with 185 hits in 456 at-bats, 37 home runs and 147 walks, in a season that began when he was 22, and he did it as part of a career in which he reached base almost half the time. His career on-base percentage of .482 is the highest in the historical record among players with 3,000 or more at-bats, ahead of Babe Ruth at .474. His .344 average, .634 slugging percentage and 1.116 OPS complete a line that has only one superior: Ruth's 1.164 OPS.

The totals, 2,654 hits and 521 home runs, understate him, because Williams lost almost five seasons in the middle of his career to military service, flying for the Navy and Marine Corps in World War II and the Korean War. He played 2,292 games over 19 seasons. This profile follows the career in phases, from San Diego to the Hall of Fame vote, and uses the historical record through 2025 for every number.

A note on sources before the numbers. The historical record has no WAR and no pitch-tracking data, so this article does not quote either. What it has is a complete batting record, a game-by-game career structure, the awards, and the vote totals. That is enough to see why Williams is argued about as the best pure hitter the game has had.

San Diego, the minors and a rookie year in Boston

Williams was born in San Diego in 1918 and was a left-handed hitter and right-handed thrower, listed at 6-foot-3 and 205 pounds in the historical record. He played professionally for the San Diego Padres of the Pacific Coast League and for the Minneapolis Millers of the American Association before the Boston Red Sox brought him to the majors. He debuted on April 20, 1939, at 20, and played his first season at Fenway Park.

The rookie season set the pattern. He hit .327 in 149 games with 31 home runs and 145 runs batted in, and the 145 RBI were the most in the American League that year. The 185 hits in 565 at-bats were good, and the 107 walks he drew, second most in the American League, were already a sign that he was not a conventional hitter. In 1940 he raised his average to .344 with 193 hits and 23 home runs. He also pitched two innings that season, allowing three hits and one earned run and striking out a batter, for a career ERA of 4.50. That is the full pitching record, a curiosity in the historical file.

The Boston Red Sox teams of those years were not good enough to win the pennant, and Williams was still playing against the Yankees, who won every flag from 1936 to 1939 and again in 1941. His own stage was the batter's box, where he refined what he called the science of hitting. He believed that the main skill of a hitter was not swinging hard but knowing which pitches to swing at, and he built a habit of waiting for a pitch in the zone that he could drive. That approach is visible in the walk totals and the on-base percentage long before analysts had names for them.

1941: the .406 season

The year 1941 is the one the record books keep. Williams hit .406 with 37 home runs, which led the American League, 120 runs batted in and 147 walks, which also led the league. He played 143 games, had 456 official at-bats, scored 135 runs and struck out only 27 times. Add three hit-by-pitches and the on-base percentage works out, from the standard formula, to about .553.

The story of the last day is the part everyone knows. Going into the final doubleheader against Philadelphia on September 28, Williams was hitting .39955 on 179 hits in 448 at-bats. Under the rules of the day a .39955 average is recorded as .400, since averages are rounded to the third decimal place. Boston's manager, Joe Cronin, offered to let him sit out the two games and keep the number. Williams played both and got six hits in eight at-bats, which brought him to 185 hits in 456 at-bats and an average of .4057. The arithmetic is simple. Had he sat, the record would show .400 by rounding; by playing, he finished with margin to spare.

The season also contained the All-Star Game in Detroit, where Williams hit a three-run home run in the bottom of the ninth inning to give the American League a 7-5 win. He finished second in the MVP voting to Joe DiMaggio, who had hit in 56 consecutive games, a decision that fans have argued about ever since. The writers voted for the team that won the pennant and the streak that had captured the country. For a profile of that streak see Joe DiMaggio: The 56-Game Hitting Streak and the Yankee Clipper.

The war years and the 1946 return

Williams followed 1941 with a Triple Crown in 1942: a .356 average, 36 home runs and 137 runs batted in. He did not win the MVP award, which went to the Yankees' Joe Gordon. Then he left. The 1943, 1944 and 1945 seasons are absent from the historical line, because Williams entered the Navy's aviation program and became a pilot. He returned for 1946 as a 27-year-old.

The first season back was a triumph. He hit .342 with 38 home runs and 123 runs batted in, won the first of his two MVP awards, and helped Boston win its first pennant since 1918. In July of that year the Cleveland manager Lou Boudreau began to shift his fielders heavily to the right side against Williams, a defensive alignment that became known as the Williams shift. Williams, by most accounts, refused to change his swing to hit to the opposite field, and he kept hitting.

The 1946 World Series was the one disappointment. Boston lost to St. Louis in seven games, and Williams, who had so dominated the regular season, went 5 for 25 in the Series, a .200 average with 1 RBI and no home runs. It was the only World Series appearance of his career, and the postseason line of 7 games, 25 at-bats and 5 hits is all he has in the record. Critics have long pointed to that Series as the gap in an otherwise complete résumé.

The second Triple Crown and the near misses

In 1947 Williams won the Triple Crown a second time, with a .343 average, 32 home runs and 114 runs batted in. He lost the MVP award by a single point to DiMaggio, in another vote that is still discussed. In 1948 he hit .369 with 188 hits and won another batting title. In 1949 he hit .343 with 43 home runs and 159 runs batted in, the most RBI of his career, and won the second MVP award. He missed a third Triple Crown on the batting title by a fraction of a point.

The 1949 season is also remembered for its ending. Boston needed to win one of its last two games against the Yankees to take the pennant, and lost both. The 1948 season had ended similarly, with a one-game playoff loss to Cleveland. Williams played in those races and put up numbers that would have won most years, but Boston won only one pennant during his career, in 1946.

The injuries began in 1950. He broke his elbow in the All-Star Game that July and played only 89 games, though he still hit 28 home runs with a .317 average. In 1951 he hit .318 with 30 home runs in 148 games. Then, in 1952, the Marine Corps recalled him for the Korean War, and he appeared in only six games that season and 37 in 1953, because of his service as a Marine Corps pilot. The 1953 line, .407 with 13 home runs in 91 at-bats, is the strangest in the record.

The late peak: .388 at 38

Williams played 117 games in 1954 and hit .345 with 29 home runs. In 1955 he hit .356, and in 1956 .345. Then came the most remarkable stretch of any aging hitter in the record. In 1957, at 38, he hit .388 with 38 home runs, and in 1958 he hit .328 and won his sixth batting title. At an age when most players are retired, he led the league in batting.

The decline, when it came, was sudden. In 1959 he hit .254, the only season in his career below .300, in 103 games and 272 at-bats. He came back in 1960 and hit .316 with 29 home runs in 310 at-bats. His last game was on September 28, 1960, and he homered in his final at-bat at Fenway Park. The writer John Updike covered the day in an essay, "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu," that is still read. Williams did not tip his cap to the crowd. He explained later that he had always refused to do so.

He made 17 All-Star Games, in every season from 1940 to 1960 except the years he was in the military, according to the historical record. He was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1966 in his first year on the ballot, with 282 votes out of 302 ballots cast, 227 needed for election. In his induction speech he asked the Hall to recognize the stars of the Negro Leagues, naming Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson, a statement that was widely noted at the time.

What the numbers meant in his era

The simplest way to read Williams is through the three rate statistics. Batting average tells you how often a hitter got a hit; on-base percentage, which counts walks, tells you how often he did not make an out; slugging percentage, which weights extra-base hits, tells you how much damage he did. Williams led the historical record in the middle one. He walked 2,021 times and struck out 709 times, which gave him nearly three walks for every strikeout. His 2,021 walks rank fourth in the historical record, behind Barry Bonds, Rickey Henderson and Ruth, and in his time, when walks were not valued as highly as hits, many writers underrated them.

To see the home run total in context, divide. His 521 home runs came in 7,706 at-bats, one every 14.8 at-bats. At that rate, every 500 at-bats he missed cost about 34 home runs and, at his career average, about 172 hits. That arithmetic is only an illustration, and it ignores the fact that players decline with age. It does show why a man who missed 1943, 1944, 1945, most of 1952 and most of 1953 is in a different conversation from one who simply retired early. Only 19 players in the historical record hit more than 521 home runs, and Williams is tied for 20th with Frank Thomas and Willie McCovey.

For comparisons, Stan Musial collected 3,630 hits, Mickey Mantle hit 536 home runs and Willie Mays compiled a complete record in the field and on the bases. Each of them is a fair comparison for a different part of Williams's game, and none matched his on-base percentage.

After baseball

Williams managed the Washington Senators from 1969 to 1971 and the Texas Rangers in 1972, for four seasons and a 273-364 record. His teams were not good, though the 1969 Washington club improved markedly and he earned a Manager of the Year honor for it. In 1970 he published The Science of Hitting, written with John Underwood, which divided the strike zone into 77 baseball-sized cells and argued that a hitter's job is to wait for the best of them. Teams and coaches still cite the book.

He spent decades as a fisherman and as an advocate for the Jimmy Fund, the charity connected to Boston's cancer research hospital. He died on July 5, 2002, in Inverness, Florida. His career line, in the context of the missed years, is the reason his name comes up in every argument about the best hitter in the game's history. Ruth had the higher OPS. Williams had the higher on-base percentage, and the .406.

What the historical record cannot say

The historical record through 2025 counts 1920 to 1948 Negro Leagues statistics as major-league data, but the coverage is partial, and Williams played in the era of segregation. His .482 career on-base percentage is the top among players with 3,000 at-bats, but few Negro Leagues players reach that threshold in the historical data because their surviving records are incomplete, so the qualifying list leaves out some of the best hitters of the era. Read the comparison with that in mind. The historical record also cannot say how many home runs he might have hit in 1943, 1944 and 1945, or how he would have fared with modern training. It does not have his batted-ball data, his pitch tracking, or the defensive metrics that would value his left-field play. A reader who wants to run the arithmetic on any of these can use the stat calculator.

Common questions

Why has no one hit .400 since? There is no agreed answer. The biologist Stephen Jay Gould argued that as the overall standard of play rose, the spread between the best and worst hitters narrowed, making extreme averages rarer. Others point to relief pitching, night games, larger gloves and strikeouts. George Brett hit .390 in 1980 and Tony Gwynn .394 in 1994, two of the nearest approaches since 1941.

Did Williams really get to .400 by rounding? No. The average before the final doubleheader was .39955, which rounds to .400, but he chose to play and finished at .4057, which rounds to .406. The rounding story is true of the morning, not of the finish.

How many Triple Crowns did he win? Two, in 1942 and 1947. Rogers Hornsby is the other player with two.

Why did he miss so many games? He served as a naval aviator in World War II and, after being recalled, as a Marine Corps pilot in the Korean War. The years absent from the historical record are 1943, 1944 and 1945, and most of 1952 and 1953.

Where can I see current leaders? The leaders page and the players page carry the current-season numbers.

Where to go next

If the question is who the best hitter of Williams's era was, read the Stan Musial profile and the Joe DiMaggio profile next, and for a power hitter from the National League of the same years, see Mel Ott. The topic page on star players collects current coverage.