Meet The Only Career .400 Hitter In Baseball History
We look at the relationship between MLB and the Negro League statistical database and how one Negro Leaguer hit for a higher average than anyone else.
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Pregame Pepper
Did you know…
. . . Major League Baseball announced Tuesday that in 2024, the San Francisco Giants and the St. Louis Cardinals will play a game at Rickwood Field in Birmingham, Ala., the former home of the Birmingham Black Barons -- a Negro League team that Willie Mays played for in 1948. Rickwood Field first opened its doors in 1910 and is the oldest professional ballpark in the United States, though the Barons haven’t played there since 1987.
. . . Though there’s no active MLB player anywhere close to a career .400 batting average, Miami Marlins infielder Luis Arraez is making a strong bid to become the first player to hit .400 in a season since Ted Williams in 1941. Entering play on June 20, he is batting exactly .400. If he had enough plate appearances to qualify for either Baseball Reference or MLB’s active leaderboards, he would be leading all active Major Leaguers with a career .327 batting average through 456 games (1,851 plate appearances).
Leading Off
Baseball’s Only Career .400 Hitter
By Paul White
If you go to MLB.com and search the official career statistics available there, you’ll find that Ty Cobb is the all-time leader in batting average with a mark of .367. Over at baseball-reference.com, you’ll get the same answer, albeit with a one-point difference in the average, at .366, because the two organizations use different data sources.
The top 10 lists, however, vary dramatically. One reason for the variance is subjective. At MLB, a minimum of 5,000 plate appearances is required to make the list, while the Baseball Reference threshold is only 3,000. That disqualifies Lefty O’Doul and his .349 career average from the official MLB list.
A second reason is somewhat silly. MLB refuses to acknowledge the .356 career average of Shoeless Joe Jackson because he was later banned from playing, as if his alleged involvement in throwing the 1919 World Series somehow made his 13 big league seasons disappear entirely.
But the biggest reason for the discrepancy is that MLB has yet to incorporate statistics from the Negro Leagues into their statistical database. So even if Jud Wilson, Turkey Stearnes, or Oscar Charleston did compile the required 5,000 big league plate appearances, they still wouldn’t appear on MLB’s lists of career leaders.
That won’t be changing anytime soon. As a recent article in The Athletic made clear, Major League Baseball couldn’t reach an agreement with Seamheads.com for the use of their extensive database of Negro Leagues statistics, the same source used by Baseball Reference. They will instead be having Retrosheet build that data from scratch, a process that will take years.
It’s a pity, not only because families of former Negro Leaguers must wait even longer to see their loved ones formally listed in Major League record books, but also because it continues to obscure some wonderful stories.
For example, dropping the plate appearance threshold to 2,500 would change the all-time batting average leader from Cobb at .367 to Josh Gibson at .373. And that’s not an unreasonable accommodation considering that Negro Leagues seasons were much shorter, and many Negro Leagues seasons still aren’t recognized as major league. It’s not the fault of those players that they didn’t accumulate more official times coming to bat. Also, it should be noted that if Gibson’s other seasons in Black baseball are included, plus his two Mexican League seasons, his batting average is still higher than Cobb’s, at .368.
Gibson’s reign atop the leaderboard wouldn’t change if the threshold dropped to 2,000 career plate appearances, or 1,500, or even 1,000. Or 900, or 800. But if we drop it to 700, we not only find a new career batting average leader, but we find something previously unknown to Major League Baseball -- a career .400 hitter.
Charlie Smith, sometimes known as Chino, was an exceptional outfielder and second baseman for the Brooklyn Royal Giants of the Eastern Colored League from 1925 to 1927. In those three seasons, he posted a slash line of .379/.449/.555, good for an OPS+ of 163. The level of talent in that league was remarkable, including Hall of Famers Oscar Charleston, Jud Wilson, and Martín Dihigo. In his final year in that league, Smith batted .457, but he didn’t win the batting title because Brooklyn only played 34 league games, compared to 60 or more for most clubs, so he didn’t compile enough plate appearances to qualify.
Brooklyn dropped out of the ECL the next season, so Smith’s statistics for 1928 aren’t considered major league, but he joined the New York Lincoln Giants of the American Negro League for 1929. That is now recognized as a major league, and Smith was clearly the best player in it.
It was a league that featured remarkably talented players like Charleston, Wilson, and Dihigo, in addition to Biz Mackey, John Henry Lloyd, Judy Johnson, Ben Taylor, and Joe Williams, but it was Chino Smith who led the league in batting average, OBP, SLG, OPS, OPS+, runs, doubles, and homers. In case anyone wondered if Smith’s .457 average in 1927 was a fluke based on only a handful of games, his 1929 average was .451 while playing in 66 of the team’s full slate of 68 games.
That remarkable season gave Smith a career major league batting average of .408. No one else with 700 or more plate appearances in the big leagues is anywhere close to that. To find anyone with a better career average, we have to drop the minimum plate appearances all the way down to 48, which gives us Herb Goodall of the 1890 Louisville Colonels. He batted .422 that year, and then never played Major League Baseball again.
The ANL broke up after that season, but Smith remained with the Lincoln Giants, playing as an independent team. The quality of talent and play was the same, but there was no league structure, so it was not considered a major league team. That’s a pity, because if it had been major league, Chino Smith’s lifetime big league batting average would have gone up. He batted .417 for the Giants in 1930, so his major league average would have been .410 if those stats had counted.
Sadly, that was the last full season Smith played. He passed away in January 1932 at the age of just 30. For many years, there were conflicting versions of what happened to him, ranging from an injury suffered in an outfield collision at the end of the 1930 championship series against the Homestead Grays, to a case of yellow fever contracted in Cuba. But in 2011, SABR researcher Gary Ashwill located his actual death certificate. Charlie Smith (he wasn’t known as Chino until his days playing in Cuba) died in New York of cancer of the stomach and pancreas. His body was returned to his native South Carolina for burial, but the location of his grave is no longer known.
It's a sad, unfortunate ending for baseball’s only career .400 hitter.
Paul White is an IBWAA Life Member who writes at Lost in Left Field. He is also a member of SABR and has written for their BioProject and Games Project. Paul is currently writing a book for McFarland Publishers about the history of the Hall of Fame’s recognition of the Negro Leagues. He lives with his wife in the suburbs of Kansas City.
The Birmingham minor-league team actually plays one official game each season at Rickwood Field as a tribute to its history and longevity.