Quote:
Originally Posted by Grandstander
In baseball, what counts is how many per opportunity over the course of a year. How these happen to get arranged within any particular number of games is utterly unimportant. If you divide the season into three 54 game segments and Player A gets 220 hits while player B gets 200 hits, but player B happened to have gotten at least one hit in each game of one of those 54 game segments, that in no manner boosts his value past player A.
For 1941, Dimaggio hit .357 in 541 at bats. During the streak he was 91 for 223, .408. That means that in the other games, he was 102 for 315, .321.
What it all actually means is that he hit .357 in 1941. That is exactly as valuable as any other player who has hit .357 with the same secondary stats. That a large portion of his total contribution was concentrated in a 56 game segment....means zip.
DiMaggio hit .408 during a 56 game stretch. That same year, Ted Williams hit .406 for the whole season. Unable to grasp that the streak meant nothing in terms of boosting the Yankees fortunes, the writers voted DiMaggio the MVP. A ridiculous award for a fluke accomplishment.
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Would a player who hit in his team's LAST 25 games, say on the 1964 Phillies or 1973 Cubs, have been valuable than a player who hit in 25 consecutive games during the middle of the season?