Nico might win the saddest batting title ever

A red hot second half (.327 batting average) has moved Nico Hoerner into second place in the NL batting title "race." He trails just the Phillies Trea Turner, and by only seven points.

Nico is currently hitting .299 and if you're wondering if that's low for a batting champion, the answer is, yeah, really low.

No player has ever won the National League batting title by hitting less than .313. Tony Gwynn won the 1988 title with that paltry number. It was the third of his eight batting titles and in the other seven he hit .351, .370, .336, .394, .368, .353 and .372.

MLB has denied rumors for decades that they intentionally deadened the ball in 1988, but either they did, or they had juiced it up in 1987 because everybody hit in 1987.

In 1988, the only NL players to hit .300 were Gwynn at .313, the Cubs' Rafael Palmeiro at .307, the Cubs' Andre Dawson at .303, Montreal's Andres Galaragga (.302) and the Barves' Gerald Perry (.300).

The lowest all-time batting average for a batting title winner came in 1968, when Carl Yastrzemski hit .301 to lead the league, and nobody else hit higher than .290.

"You know who won the batting title with the best .301 I ever saw, Wimpy? ... Yaz."

That same year, Pete Rose won the NL title with a .335 average and two Alous finished second (Matty at .332) and third (Felipe at .317). Even then, only five NL players hit .300 or better. 1968 is known as the "Year of the Pitcher" and featured Bob Gibson posting a ludicrous 1.12 ERA and Denny McLain winning 30 games. They put Denny in prison for that. Well, that and racketeering, cocaine possession, fraud and extortion.

This year just kind of feels like the continuation of a National League trend. Luis Arraez won last year's batting title while hitting .314, but only two other players (Shohei Ohtani and Marcel Ozuna) hit .300 in the entire league.

Arraez won the title two years ago with a more "batting title-esque" .354 average and two other players (Ronald Acuna and Freddie Freeman) hit better than .330, but Cody Bellinger of the Cubs and Mookie Betts tied for fourth a .307 and that was it. Nobody else hit .300.

Only three players hit .300 in 2022 (Jeff McNeil, Freeman and Paul Goldschmidt). And in 2021 even though Frank Schwindel hit .326 he didn't have enough ABs to win the title (he'd have finished second behind Trea Turner, anyway), and while seven guys hit .300, four of them hit .305 or less.

It's probably not a surprise that averages are trending down. Teams don't give a shit about them. On base and slugging are far more important to them than the admittedly flawed batting average stat. Batting average was only ever a thing because it could be calculated using the old four line newspaper box score.