Baseball's Best Hitter Tries for Glory

Hit a baseball with a bat. Crack.

All things considered—and nothing is unconsidered in the serious business of games played by grown men—it is the most difficult task in sport. Consider the problem: a bat 2¾ in. in diameter at its widest, hitting a ball not quite 3 in. in diameter; two objects—one cylindrical, the other a sphere—meeting headon. Consider the speed: a major league pitcher's fastball traveling well over 90 m.p.h., hissing the 60-ft. 6-in. distance from mound to plate in ⅔ of a second. Consider the odds: the game's greatest stars failing the task seven times in ten, and still they are .300 hitters, worthy of holding forth at banquets in the winter and holding out for a bigger piece of the pie in the spring. And hitting .400 for the season? That would take the cake, and no one has done it since Ted Williams finished at .406 to bring glory to the summer of '41.

Now consider Rodney Cline Carew, the best damn hitter in baseball. He is the only man of his generation with the gifts—and the hard-won mastery of the art of hitting—to have a shot at joining the select club of the .400 hitters, which includes Ty Cobb, Joe Jackson, Nap Lajoie, George Sisler, Rogers Hornsby, Harry Heilmann and Bill Terry. In an era when batters must contend with night games and coast-to-coast jet lag —handicaps that the oldtimers never faced—the intense first baseman of the Minnesota Twins was hitting .402 last week and had been up to .411 when the season moved into July. In June he batted .486—with one astonishing eleven-game streak at .610. What's more, Ca-rew's performance this year is no fluke. He has a lifetime average of .332, which ranks him with the giants of the recent past (Williams, .344; Joe DiMaggio, .325; Stan Musial, .331). His performance makes a mockery out of the records of such current celebrities as the New York Yankees' Reggie Jackson (.267) and the Cincinnati Reds' Joe Morgan (.282). Carew has won the American League batting championship five times, and four of those titles came in a row. Only Ty Cobb (nine) and Rogers Hornsby (six) won more consecutive batting crowns. Now 31 and in his eleventh season with the Twins (in a state where they name snow cones after football players instead of candy bars after batsmen), Carew has spent a career as the best-kept secret in American sport—a long neglected but authentic hero. Now he can turn obscurity into immortality. According to no less an authority than Williams himself, Carew's chances of reaching his goal of a .400 season are good. Says Teddy Ballgame: "Of all the guys in the game now, I think he can do it."