Luis Arráez And The Chase

Why his second, third and fourth stops at .400 meant more to me than the first.

I have a long-running interest in which sorts of ball things get remembered for 100 years. This year seems certain to be remembered as the year the pitch clock debuted. But as we head into the second half there are two other reasonably strong candidates, both of which have made me rethink some things. One is Shohei Ohtani elevating even further, which I aspire to write some words about later this week. The other is Luis Arráez’ .400 chase, which has made me think hard about the word “chase.” Let’s go.

Luis Arráez was hitting .408 on May 9; he was hitting .398 on May 10th. I might have given him another day or two of attention, I can’t remember, but May 10th was the day I probably lost interest. Anyway, he was hitting .379 on May 13th, and after that I’m sure I’d checked out. It was, then, a shock almost a month later to find that he was hitting .400 again. I realized: Wow! Deep in my soul, I really, really don’t expect interesting things.

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On May 19, 1927, Babe Ruth was the biggest celebrity in the world. But 48 hours later, as Leigh Montville tells it in The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth, Charles Lindbergh landed in Paris and became “bigger than Babe Ruth… the Babe times two or three or four or maybe 10. The offers that had come to the Babe—for books and movies and vaudeville tours, for endorsements and charity appearances—now came to Lindbergh with bigger numbers, more zeroes on the end. … In 1927 A.D., America chewed up heroes.”

What could Babe Ruth do to avoid being chewed up? Well, he could break his own home run record, 59 dingers, set in 1921. Conveniently, the same week in June that Lindbergh arrived back in New York for days of celebrations and a 22-mile ticker-tape parade, sports pages across the country started to note that Ruth’s home run pace was slightly ahead of his own 1921 pace. So began one of the biggest sports stories of the 1920s—the Great American Home Run Derby, as it was known nationally, with Lou Gehrig and Ruth battling daily the stay ahead of Ruth’s 1921 pace, and ahead of each other.

A derby is a race. That’s the metaphor: Gehrig and Ruth were racing each other. When two people are racing, one is ahead and one is behind but they’re both doing the same verb.  

There was another phrase that was often used in newspapers that summer to describe this event, and near as I can tell this is the origin of this phrase used to describe sports doers who have a shot at breaking a record: It was called a chase.

A chase is a different metaphor than a race, because you can only chase from behind. Who is chasing whom in this metaphor, or who is chasing what, or what is chasing whom? Well, Gehrig and Ruth (the 1927 version) were chasing Ruth (the 1921 version). They were both behind 1921 Ruth’s pace pretty much the entire time. Ruth was briefly ahead of the pace in early June 1927, but by the time Chase talk began (on or around July 3 ,1927) he (and Gehrig) were both behind that pace. At no point between June 25^th and the second-to-last day of the season was Babe Ruth actually on pace to hit 60 or more home runs and break the record. He only caught his earlier self on the third-to-last day of the season, when he hit his 58th and 59th home runs, tying the record with two games to go. Gehrig, lumped into this chase with Ruth, was also never on pace to hit 60 home runs. He topped out at a 58-homer pace, on July 4.

As the century rolled on, the word chase—record chase, home run chase, .400 chase— often began to be used by sports headliners to describe people who were ahead of the pace. In 1961, Roger Maris’ home run pursuit was also referred to as a chase:

But Maris’ home run trajectory was quite different than Ruth’s had been in 1927. He didn’t chase down the record. Rather, he had a huge flurry of dingers in May and early June to put himself quite a bit ahead of Ruth’s pace, peaking at a 68-homer pace in late July. He slowed down and ended up with 61, just enough.

That, too, describes Mark McGwire, who succeeded in his 1998 home run “chase” of Maris’ 61. McGwire had an 80-HR pace on June 1^st, then shed some of that pace but never dropped below a 62-HR pace the rest of the way. He spent the entire chase with a pace ahead of Maris.

Barry Bonds was on pace to hit 87 homers in mid-June 2001, a big enough cushion for him to end up with a new record (73) despite slowing down considerably the rest of the way.

Aaron Judge last year had a burst of 10 homers in 12 games coming out of the All-Star break, putting him on pace to hit 67. His pace slowed but never dropped below 61, which was still the American League and/or “clean” record. He ended up with 62, having spent all of the final months of the chase ahead.

So, this seems to be a different meaning. If 1927 Ruth’s chase was from behind, but Maris’, McGwire’s, Bonds’ and Judge’s chases were from ahead, and since you can’t chase from ahead, that means…

They were being chased. They were being chased by regression to the mean. The question wasn’t whether Bonds could keep hitting home runs at an 87-HR pace—nobody thinks that was his true talent level—but whether he could get to 70 before regression fully caught up with him and dragged him down.

We’re all so smart now. I don’t want to brag, but I’m like, really sophisticated. I know that extreme outlier performances are pretty much always luck and fluke and small sample size and generous circumstances and that regression is coming for them all. When I root for a player to break a record—or, as in the case of a .400 batting average, a quasi-record—I’m usually rooting for somebody who is way ahead of a pace after a huge (small sample size) April, for whom regression seems inevitable, but who might ever so narrowly make it to the end of the season before regression has caught up all the way. If I were to analyze myself, I might say I’m trying to impose order on outliers, that I’m not willing to give myself over fully their weirdness. I treat them as flukes that haven’t had enough time to be unfluked.

So the chase metaphor is—well, you might think of those people who try to outrun the Freeze at Braves games. They get a big head start and then the faster runner takes off behind them and runs them down, and they’re just desperately trying to slump past the finish line before he overtakes them. A record pursuit usually feels like somebody (the guy on pace to hit 87 homers) trying to outrun the Freeze (regression to the mean). It’s a chase, sure, but the Freeze is the one chasing.

I realized this is how I think of record pursuits when I wrote this paragraph last month, about the Oakland Athletics’ “pursuit” of the worst record in major league history:

As long as a team is balanced over the possibility of something unprecedented, it is stimulating to watch them, just to see which way the teeter tumbles. As soon as this year’s A’s (almost inevitably) win six out of 11 and break free of the 1962 Mets’ win pace, I’ll have to find somewhere else to get my fix. 

They immediately won seven of 11, escaped the 1962 Mets’ win pace, and I quit paying attention to the A’s any more than I’m paying attention to the Royals or Nationals. Just lost all interest. I know they’re not really that bad. I just thought their head start might be large enough to outrun regression. It wasn’t.

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A few years ago, I wrote a piece explaining why I’d become “convinced that .400 has become an unbreakable threshold, that it will never happen again, that even the .400 chase is extinct.” That last part, that was probably a reflection of my narrowing imagination. I’m too realistic to imagine a player chasing down .400; as soon as a player dips below it—as every player since 2008 has by no later than the 50th game of the season—I’m checked out. I even feel slightly weird writing about Luis Arráez’ .400 chase today, when he’s dipped to .383—impossibly far from .400, to my sophisticated self.

But this year Arráez has proved this instinct wrong, repeatedly. He was hitting .500 in mid-April—fairly interesting—and then he dropped below .400 in mid-May—totally predictable—and then that’s when he really shocked me. He came back. He spent a month chasing .400 from behind, and he got there :

All told, Arráez has fallen below .400 four times since May 1, which means he’s chased down .400 three times, twice from the .370s. We’re all sophisticated enough to know he’s not likely to do it again, especially in this day and age and offensive environment. But those things do, in fact, happen. Babe Ruth did it. Several times, Arráez has done it.