Before this season began, I guessed at 12 active batters’ chances of retaining their lifetime .300 batting averages, with a nod towards a simpler time when we actually cared about batting averages, and about retiring with the high honor of having one over .300.  I thought I’d update that piece on what the 2018 season has done to their chances, and to the guesswork I put into predicting those chances.

First place, there’s an awful lot of speculation going on about one of the .300+ lifetime batters retiring after this season’s end: Sports Illustrated just posted a piece on that subject https://www.si.com/mlb/2018/09/13/minnesota-twins-joe-mauer-considering-retirement and if I can trust Twitter and my own senses, I’d place a sizeable bet that Mauer will announce his retirement in a few days. (The Twins staged all sorts of ceremonial events, including putting Mauer back behind the plate for the final batter, and having his kiddies run out for an on-field hug.)  I had Mauer as a mortal lock to retire with a .300 lifetime average, based on his .3082 average going into the season and his declining numbers, which left him at least two seasons’ worth of low batting averages before his lifetime .300 would be in danger. As of this writing, Mauer is down to a .3063, thanks to his .282 average in 2018, which would have given him a few more seasons of sub-.300 batting before he lost his .300 average. He remains at "mortal lock."

Ichiro Suzuki, among my mortal lox rated as an immortal sashimi, has already retired with a .3111 (down from the .3116 he entered 2018 with, thanks to an abysmal .215 average at the beginning of the season) so that one is in the books as well. (Thanks, MarisFan 61, for the correction to Ichiro's stats.) The two others I had as certain lifetime .300+ batters were Miguel Cabrera and Joey Votto.  In an abbreviated season, Cabrera batted .299, so he still stands at the lifetime .316 average he entered the season with, and Votto batted .284, doing little harm to his lifetime .3134 average, now down to .3108.  Both remain as excellent bets to remain above .300 as they enter their middle 30s. (Miggy is about 5 months older than Joey, both of whom turned 35 this year.) Cabrera remains more of a lock than Votto, being older and having a greater margin of BA points. The counter-example would be Victor Martinez, who went from six points up at age 35 to now being four points under.

All of the batters I categorized under "has a chance"--Jose Altuve, Buster Posey, Albert Pujols and Robinson Cano-- still have a chance, though some did themselves harm and some did themselves good:

I had compared Altuve at age 27 to Billy Herman, who held a .319 BA at that age but whose average declined beginning at age 28, when Herman batted .277.  In contrast, Altuve put up a fine average in his age-28 year, .315, very close to the .3162 lifetime he had coming into this season, putting him one year closer to retirement and no worse off. Altuve’s main obstacle is his relative youth: a lot can happen in the next decade, and as soon as he starts hitting below .300 consistently, it’s all going to be bad.

Buster Posey is a little worse off than he was, entering the season batting .3083 and leaving it batting .3059, having hit .284 in a partial 2018. He’ll be lucky to bat .284 over the rest of his career, and if he lasts three more years at that rate, his lifetime .300 BA is history. It’s going to be a race between his retirement and his lifetime .300 BA, and since he’s turning 32 next March and is signed through 2022, I’d bet on his .300 average losing that race.

Pujols had another poor season, batting only .245, pulling his .3050 average entering 2018 down to .3023. Another year at that rate and his .300 lifetime average will disappear permanently—realistically, his only chance is retirement, and he still has two lucrative years left on his contract, so I’d say he did his lifetime average some serious damage. I’d change his rating from "has a chance" to "not much chance" at this point.  He’s unlikely to retain even the .255 average he’s posted from 2013-2018, but if he does, the .300 lifetime average will disappear for good around August of next season. The only chance he has at this point is retirement (or debilitating injury), and his contract runs through 2021

The fourth player who had a chance is Robinson ("Hello Joe, what do you know, I just got back from a vaudeville show") Cano, who after three straight sub-.300 seasons, helped himself out, like Altuve, by batting very close to his lifetime average entering the 2018 season while getting another year older. Cano, who batted .303, left his lifetime .3045 exactly where it was, give or take a rounding decimal.  He’s still teetering on the brink of extinction (unlike Altuve, who still has .015 points to lose) and I don’t think he’ll make it. His contract runs through 2023, so he’s going to play at least another four seasons.  I see him batting around .270 from here on in, with a little pop, and retiring with an average in the low .290s, but I could be wrong.

One guy I’m not wrong about, though, is Ryan Braun, the second-greatest Jewish ballplayer born with the name of "Braun," who began 2018 with the smallest margin, at age 33. Braun’s .254 average in 2018 pulled him down to .299, and he ain’t clawing his way of that hole, not in this lifetime. Over the past five seasons now, Braun has averaged .277, and is a classic example of a .300 hitter who hung on after he lost that particular tool in his toolkit. Braun headed up my group of four batters classified as "Dead .300 walking," just behind D.J. LeMahieu (.3019/.3018), who also lost his lifetime .300 average in 2018 by batting a mere .278.

Still only 30 years old, LeMahieu might rebound, but virtually no batter has a higher average over the second half of his career than he had in his first, and if you want to find that rare exception, you’d do well to search elsewhere than in Coors Field.  LeMahieu’s closeness to the .300 mark was only one reason I’d pegged him at "Dead .300 walking" in the spring. Coors Field was a bigger part of that designation, since LeMahieu’s batting average was compiled there, and he has no guarantee of staying there for the remainder of his career. Even if he’d won another batting championship there in 2018, I still wouldn’t give him much of a shot—he just doesn’t have much margin to spare, and he’s virtually certain to bat well below .300 from here on in.

His Rockies’ teammate Charlie Blackmon (middle name: "Cobb"), also a Coors former batting champ, was on my "Dead .300 Walking" list as well: his .3049 entering the year got dragged down by his .289 average to .3021.  Despite being two years older than LeMahieu, they have almost an identical (low) number of big league at bats, so a few more years of sub-.300 batting, will pull Blackmon down as well.  He’s signed through 2023, which gives him a long time to lose two BA points.

The last guy on my "Dead .300 Walking" list was the youngest guy of the bunch, Mike Trout, who actually raised his .3060 average  (to .3067) by batting .312. Still won’t get him off the list: barring a career-ending injury, Trout’s going to play for a long, long time, well after his ability to hit .300 has left him. Trout is often compared to Mickey Mantle, so let me remind you that at Trout’s age, 26 (he just turned 27, but 2018 was his age-26 season), Mantle had a lifetime average of .314 and it didn’t last.  Trout’s .307 average will not last either—he’s just too young, and too powerful a hitter for him to lose his job when his average starts to dip below .300, which it will. I can easily see Trout playing for a decade or more with a BA under .280.

By age 26, Mantle had had seasons where he batted .358 and .365, figures Trout has never approached. His lifetime high is .326, and that was seven years ago. Over the past five seasons, 2600 at-bats, Trout has batted .303—dropping ten or twenty points from that level is not only conceivable, it is likely from here on in, and he can still hold his job batting well below that. If he puts in a few more seasons batting above .310 in 2019 and 2020, he can buy himself some time, but I still think it’s a lost cause. He’s just too close, with too much time to go.

The one active player with a .300+ BA whom I didn’t include was Dustin Pedroia, who’s also in the "Dead .300 Walking" club.  Pedroia technically dropped below .300 with a dreadful .091 BA in 2018 (1-for-11) though rounding saved his lifetime .300 BA. He’s ten hitless at-bats away from dropping off the list forever. Under contract through 2021, Pedroia has no chance at all to end up over .300—that ship has sailed, whatever Petey’s future holds. Like Pujols, the only thing that will save him is immediate retirement, and that would mean leaving millions and millions on the table.

Are there any new candidates for a lifetime .300 BA since the spring of this year?

Not really. Baseball-reference.com keeps a list (https://www.baseball-reference.com/leaders/batting_avg_career.shtml ) of batting average leaders, with a minimum of 3000 plate appearances, and everyone who appears on it for the first time after the 2018 season is approaching .300 from the wrong angle. Jose Abreu (.2945) and Christian Yelich (.2965), for example, need to be ABOVE .300, not below it, as they get on the list. It is virtually impossible that their eventual lifetime averages will rise very much as they accrue more plate appearances, and virtually certain that they will eventually fall. Other active players (Daniel Murphy at .2994 and Matt Holliday at .2991) are just too close to their decline phases to have any kind of chance of raising their BAs . If Paul Goldschmidt  (.2973) were three points above .300 instead of three points below it at this stage of his career, I’d put him in the "Dead .300 Walking" category.  David Wright (.2964) is a few days ahead of Joe Mauer but on the wrong side of the ledger. To end up with a .300+ BA, you need some BA points in reserve from the time you enter Baseball-reference’s list, and to be close to the end of your career: Victor Martinez, for example, had a .306 BA at age 35, but his past four seasons (.245, .289, .255, .251) have wrecked his chances permanently. Everybody dies, as my friend Lawrence Block entitled the best of his mystery novels, and everyone goes through a prolonged decline phase. Unless you actually die.