Sweeney: One Hit Away from .300 Career Batting Average
Mike Sweeney, mentioned earlier today on this blog for signing a minor-league contract with the Oakland Athletics, has a career batting average of .299.
Which is agonizingly close to having a career mark of .300 -- which sounds SO much nicer, in baseball talk.
In fact, Sweeney's career average is .2994.
If he gets one more major-league at-bat, and gets a hit, he would be at .2995 -- which rounds up to .300.
And what's the big deal about that?
Among ballplayers all-time, with at least 3,500 at-bats, only 180 are career .300 hitters. (Led by Ty Cobb, at .366 in his career.)
Sweeney would make 181 -- and the list actually will shrink, because a batch of guys who are in the decline phase of their careers (or have it still ahead) are barely over. 300.
Among them: Lance Berkman and Bobby Abreu at .300, Juan Pierre and Sean Casey at .301, Jose Vidro and Michael Young at .302, Ivan Rodriguez, Moises Alou and Frank Thomas at .303, etc.
Sweeney himself is in the decline phase of his career. He was a career .302 hitter before last season, when he hit .260 in 265-at bats.
But if he gets one hit ... he could retire on the spot and be a .300 hitter! Or 2-for-4 would work, too. Actually, 1-for-2 would get him there, too. But 1-for-3 would not.
And how abvout this: If he had one less at-bat in his career (4,668 sted 4,669) he would be a .300 hitter. It's that close.
Just a thought. Hitting .299 is almost as bad as having 399 home runs. Not as bad as having 499 homers. But it's a great threshold for a big-leaguer.