[chucksabr]

Top First Division Batting Marks Continue to Fall

It seems as though after every season we find we have been treated to yet another broken record when it comes to offence in the First Division of the Baseball League. Nineteen hundred and three was no different.

This season saw yet another record set for home runs by Alistair Bolton. He slugged thirty eight of them this year, which smashed the previous top tier record of twenty nine set by, of course, Alistair Bolton. Mr Bolton is clearly a specimen unto himself. He has hit twenty home runs or more every season from 1899, and has to his credit an impossibly high 170 home runs through his career.

Charles Doyle, the Burton United third baseman, is second in career homers, with 107, but he is thirty seven years of age, accumulated those over fifteen seasons, and is obviously coming to the end of his career. Bolton is 29 years old and have got his home runs over a mere nine seasons. It is not far-fetched to surmise that Bolton will end up with not only more then 300 home runs, but perhaps more than 400, if he can maintain his herculean pace of thirty home runs per season.

No similar power performance is taking place anywhere else on Earth, not even in America, where the most home runs hit in a career has been 138 by one Roger Connor across eighteen seasons, and the most hit in a recent season is 25, albeit in 155 matches, by a fellow with the delightfully American moniker of Buck Freeman. This realisation boggles the mind, and it is not hyperbolic to categorically state that Alistair Bolton is a power batsman nonpareil, occupying all alone a stratosphere of his own making.

Nearly as amazing has been the progression of the hits average record, in that it is a skill not owned by one man alone. The first baseballer to bat for a .400 average was Frank Woodward, the superannuated catcher who streaked across the British baseball sky for three years before settling in to several years mired in middle aged mediocrity. Mr Woodward debuted to a .407 average in 1894 with Blackburn. Brandon Bradley of Villa also batted .400 that season. They’ve been followed by Jay Jones and William Clark (each .405 in 1896), Charles Stanford and Frank Hodder (each .401 in 1898), Harrison Whittington (an astounding .417 in 1901), and William Shand (.401 in 1902).

This year, the redoubtable Mr Shand became the first repeat .400 batter with his incredible .423 effort for Small Heath in Birmingham. Renowned for his ability to “put the bat on the ball”— he struck out only seven times the entire season— Shand is the rare catcher who can help teams win on both sides of the baseball. The shame of it all is that he is also thirty seven years old, thus finding his ability too late in life for us to enjoy it much longer.

We look forward with anticipation to the surprises the 1904 might deliver when it comes to amazing performances. We have not been disappointed thus far.