(Video) This Day In Sports History 1960: Ted Williams Hits 521st Home Run In Last Career At-Bat

Posted by Sabrina B. @gametimegirl

September 28th, 1960: Ted Williams hits 521st home run in last career at-bat. It’s been 70 years since Ted Williams hit .406 and will probably never get touched.
Check the details and video after the jump…

It took several conversations before the most cerebral hitter of his generation, Tony Gwynn, finally asked the most cerebral hitter of any generation, Ted Williams, about his famous 1941 season. “Ted looked at me and said, ‘If I knew that hitting .400 would have been so damn important, I would have done it more often,”’ Gwynn said. “I just laughed. But the more I thought about that, he probably could have hit .400 again if he had wanted.”

He probably could have, but he didn’t, and no one else has hit .400 since Williams batted .406 in 1941. Since then, only four players have hit as high as .380 — Williams .388 in 1957, Rod Carew .388 in 1977, George Brett .390 in 1980 and Gwynn .394 in 1994, a year in which he played 110 games when the season was canceled due to a player’s strike. It seems highly unlikely, if not impossible, that anyone will hit .400 anytime soon for a variety of reasons, the first one being this: There is nobody in baseball history like Ted Williams.

“Best hitter I ever faced,” Bob Feller said. “And I never saw anyone hit like he did in 1941.”

Williams had batted .344 in 1940 at age 21, but he suffered a wrist injury in spring training of 1941, missed some games and didn’t really hit like Ted Williams in April. But in May, he went 44-for-101, with 22 walks and only three strikeouts. He got to .404 on May 25, never dropped below .393 the rest of the season and peaked at .436 on June 6. After July 25, his average never dropped below .400. When he got to the final day of the season, a doubleheader at Shibe Park in Philadelphia, Williams was hitting .3996, which rounded off to .400. Red Sox manager Joe Cronin gave Williams the option to play that day. Williams said if he couldn’t hit .400 from the beginning to the end of a season, he didn’t deserve it.

“I asked him about that final day,” Gwynn said, “and he said, ‘Hell yeah was I going to play.”’

Williams went 4-for-5 in the first game, the Red Sox overcame an 11-3 deficit to beat the A’s, 12-11, and Williams raised his average to .404. He insisted on playing the second game, and he went 2-for-3 to finish the season at .406. In the doubleheader, with all the pressure of .400, he went 6-for-8. He was the first player to hit .400 since Bill Terry in 1930, and the first American Leaguer since Harry Heilmann in 1923. Williams hit 37 home runs that year, drove in 120 runs, drew 147 walks and struck out 27 times. His .553 on-base percentage was a major league record until Barry Bonds broke it in 2002 (.582). Williams’ OPS was also an incredible 1.287.

“He told me that he didn’t think it was that big a deal hitting .400,” Gwynn said. “It had been done a few years earlier. He figured that someone else would do it. He wasn’t that impressed by it.”

Seventy years later, it is more impressive since no one has really come close to hitting .400, and Williams hit .406 with great power and production. The wait has enhanced his legacy.

“He is one of a kind,” Gwynn said. “His memory was unbelievable. He could dig in to his memory bank, and pull out all sorts of stuff. All good hitters have that, but he had it to a higher level than anyone I’ve ever met. It was uncanny the stuff he could pull out. He knew the pitcher, the weather, the way the ball was carrying that day, the thickness of the grass.”

(Story Continues…)
WRITTEN BY By Tim Kurkjian
ESPN.com & FULL STORY HERE