As of the end of games on Tuesday, June 3rd, Chipper Jones had 85 hits in 208 AB, which is a 40.9% success rate. Put another way- Chipper Jones is chasing .400. Let's get a few objections out of the way first:

"Hey, who cares about batting average, what an archaic stat!"

"Settle down, its barely June!"

"People just don't hit for high averages like that anymore!

These are legitimate gripes. He probably won't hit .400 this season. He almost certainly won't have the best season for a hitter(Hamilton), and probably not even the best season in the NL(Utley, Berkman). But .400 is a magical number in baseball, up there with 56 and 755 (ahem...762). I bet you can name the last guy to hit .400 without even having to think about it, and its been 67 years since he did it. Nowadays, we all realize that there are more important statistics than BA, things like OPS and VORP and WARP. The number .400 itself is arbitrary, given its magic because its a round number and aesthetically pleasing. This milestone is much more style than substance. So, rather than taking this seriously and making wild predictions, lets have fun with this while it lasts.

The facts:

Chipper has 85 hits in 208 AB, with 35 walks, giving him 243 PA. In order to qualify, he needs 3.1 PA per team game, or about 503 PA. He is on pace to record 598 AB and 699 PA. Given his age, his history, and the realities of a 162-game MLB season, he has almost zero chance of reaching these totals, however.

The fun:

If we make a few reasonable assumptions, such as the number of AB he will have, his "true" batting average, and a normal distribution, we can calculate how likely Chipper is to end the season hitting .400 or higher. For his "true" batting average, I am going to use his career average, .310, a conservative estimate considering his last 2+ seasons. Using that, we have the following chances based on various AB totals:

450 AB: 1 in 270

500 AB: 1 in 670

550 AB: 1 in 1703

600 AB: 1 in 4016

For comparison sake, lets take a look at two of the more famous recent .400 chases, and the last man to actually accomplish the feat- Tony Gwynn, 1997; George Brett, 1980; and Ted Williams, 1941. After 59 team games in each of those seasons, using the same assumptions as above for Chipper, here is how likely those hitters were to hit .400:

Gwynn: 1 in 68

Brett: <1 in a million!!

Williams: 1 in 259

The biggest factor for Gwynn is that his career BA is 28 points higher than Chipper's. Brett's season was remarkable in that at this point in the season he was only hitting .337 and was in the middle of a stint on the DL that would cost him nearly 30 games. Then he came off the DL and went on an amazing run for the remainder of the season, hitting .421 from July 10th onward. In 1941, Williams was coming off the bench for the early part of the season, and thus had only 32 hits in 93 AB through 59 team games. This explains why he was such a long-shot at this point of the season- he didn't have 208 AB until July 15th.

As you can see, hitting .400 is a difficult task, no matter how talented a hitter you are. To give some perspective on these probabilities, you are dealt pocket aces in Texas Hold'em 1 in every 221 hands. Approximately 1 in every 75 people has red hair. 1 in every 4000 people in the world is from Gambia. So I think its safe to conclude that Chipper's chances of hitting .400 this season are squarely between his chances of going all-in and his chances of moving to Banjul.

-Chad Gonczy