He hits his singles and soft drives in Miami’s mostly empty stadium and is little known. But if he stays above .400 past the All-Star break, his status will change. The pressure will mount with each at-bat, as it did for Williams even in an era reliant on radio broadcasts and the slow churn of daily newspapers to tell the story.
In today’s world, every swing will be digitized, streamed instantly across the globe and analyzed by commentators and fans. Arraez will be known far beyond the domain of baseball aficionados.
Arraez, a Venezuelan who is 5 feet 10 inches, is chasing more than a match of Williams, who finished that ’41 season with a .406 average. In 1947, Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color line, which had been in place since the 19th century. No player has ever finished a season batting at or above .400 since Major League Baseball became an integrated game.
Pursuing records has a magnetic way of enthralling and drawing us in. Always will, always has.
Consider the ancient Greeks. There were no clocks or stopwatches in the Athens of the sixth century B.C., but the Greeks kept a tally of the unparalleled number of victories achieved by athletes such as Milo of Croton, a wrestler who won gold medals in six Olympics.
And just as we are today, the ancient Greeks were obsessed with reputation.
“Imagine a world with no Twitter, no newspaper or ‘SportsCenter’ highlights,” said David Lunt, an associate professor of history at Southern Utah University. “You just have these reputations, these stories that people tell about you. ‘Oh my gosh, you would not believe what this amazing athlete did.’ And there were different ways they came up with to commemorate that.”