The Last .400 Hitter

Artie Wilson, once one of America’s great ballplayers, now sells cars in Portland

By Eric Enders
September 2000 (previously unpublished)

The last .400 hitter is a modest man, and is not used to getting all this attention. “I have to go pretty soon,” he says. “I have some customers coming in. Cars to sell, you know.”

These days Artie Wilson, 79, sells Lincolns at an auto dealership in Portland, Ore., a job he has held for more than 40 years. Few of his customers know that in 1948, their car salesman batted .402 for the Birmingham Black Barons of the Negro American League, making him – and not Ted Williams, who accomplished the feat seven years earlier – the last man to bat over .400 in major professional baseball. That few know this does not bother Wilson.

“I still say it doesn’t mean that much,” he says. “I never worried about my batting average, and nobody ever mentioned it to me. I never looked at the newspaper to keep up with my batting average; all I worried about was playing and getting on base.”

With Todd Helton of the Colorado Rockies chasing the .400 mark, the holy grail of batting, Williams has received much notoriety as the last to bat .400 in the major leagues. But seldom is it mentioned that the major leagues in 1941, including all the pitchers Williams batted against, were exclusively white. The names of those who have batted .400 in the majors – Ty Cobb, Joe Jackson, Rogers Hornsby – roll off the tongue with ease, but those who might have done it in the Negro Leagues – Artie Wilson, Oscar Charleston, Spotswood Poles – are less familiar.

“Some might say it doesn’t count because I did it in the Negro Leagues,” Wilson says. “Well, if I hit .400 in the Negro Leagues, I probably would have hit more in the majors, because I’d have gotten better pitches to hit.”

In 1948, when Wilson reached the mark, two major league teams were integrated, but most of the best African-American players still played in leagues that were separate in fame but equal in talent. By then the Negro Leagues were keeping careful statistics in the hopes that it would help them sell their players to major league franchises. The records show that Wilson got 134 hits in 333 at-bats in Birmingham’s 76 official league games. That lofty .402 average made him one of the first Negro League players to be sold, although his sale sparked a dispute between the New York Yankees and Cleveland Indians over which team had purchased his contract first. The Yankees won the dispute, but lost Wilson when he refused an assignment to the minor leagues.

“They wanted to send me to Newark, but I didn’t want to play for less money than I was making in the Negro Leagues, and I said no way,” Wilson says. “I’d rather stay in the Negro Leagues, knowing what I’d have to go through being in Newark, like what Jackie had to go through. So I turned them down.”

The Yankees’ original scouting report on Wilson and Birmingham teammate Piper Davis, sent to team President Lee MacPhail in 1948, reveals the reasons the franchise didn’t want Wilson on its major league club. “They are both good ball players,” the report reads. “[But] there isn’t an outstanding Negro player that anybody could recommend to step into the big league and hold down a regular job. ... These committees apply the pressure to hire one or perhaps two [black] players. If you hire one or two, they will want you to hire another one.”

After Wilson refused assignment to Newark, his contract was sold to the Pacific Coast League, which fancied itself a third major league, where he became one of the most popular stars in the league’s history. He would eventually play for five different teams in the PCL, collecting 200 hits in five of his six full seasons there. In 1949 with Oakland, he had 264 hits and scored 168 runs, and over his ten-year minor league career amassed 1,609 hits.

“I was strictly a line drive hitter,” says Wilson, a left-handed batter. “Most of my home runs I hit between the outfielders and had to run. I wasn’t able to hit it out of the park, so I let all the big guys behind me do it. I always batted leadoff, and I was there to get on base.”HeHe

In the 1940s and ‘50s Wilson was one of the best unknown players in baseball. Although former Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda once called him the greatest player who never played in the major leagues, Wilson did get a cup of coffee: 22 at-bats with the New York Giants in 1951. But he was never given the chance to win a regular job with the team, and was used largely as a pinch hitter and defensive replacement before being sent back to the minors.

“I figured I’d get a chance,” he said. “If anybody could make it, I could make it. If I’d gotten with some other club, I’d have been the main shortstop, but the Giants had a tough combination: Alvin Dark at short and Eddie Stanky at second. It’s pretty tough to break into a lineup like that. I was a rookie and didn’t know the club, didn’t know the players. So I just sat there and waited.”

The waiting ended in mid-May of 1951, when the Giants sent Wilson down to make room for a young prospect who was hitting .477 with Triple-A Minneapolis: Willie Mays. Ironically, Mays and Wilson had been teammates with the Black Barons in 1948, the year Wilson hit .400. “Oh, I knew Mays before he was even big enough to play ball,” Wilson says. “He’s from my hometown, Birmingham, Alabama. I’ve known him all his life.

“They needed a center fielder, and I’d been telling Leo [Durocher, the Giants manager] the whole time to bring Mays up. I wanted to come back to the Coast League because I didn’t want to be sitting on the bench up there – I’ve got to play. So finally one day they said, ‘You still want to go back to the Coast League, and we’ll bring Mays up?’ And I said sure. So I went to Minneapolis and Mays came up to the New York Giants.”

Wilson never made it back to the majors, and his major league career batting average stands at .182: 4 for 22. His lack of success was due in part to an unusual defensive strategy employed against him by the Brooklyn Dodgers, whose manager, Charlie Dressen, had managed Wilson in Oakland. Dressen knew Wilson was an extreme opposite-field hitter, so he shifted most of his defensive players to the left side of the playing field. (Ironically, another batter famous for facing such a shift was Williams, Wilson’s .400-hitting counderpart.) The shift, as Dan Parker wrote in the New York Mirror, made Wilson look “like a hockey player trying to shoot the puck through a netful of fat men wielding snow shovels.”

The Wilson Shift was not a new phenomenon – he had previously faced it, and defeated it, in both the Negro Leagues and the minors – but in 1951, it was successful enough to bring his brief major league trial to an end. Wilson was dispatched to Minneapolis and, soon thereafter, back to Oakland, where he was honored with a floral tribute upon his return. He continued to face the shift and, like Williams, stubbornly refused to change his batting style to combat it.

“They put the shift on, but it didn’t make any difference – I still got base hits,” he says. “They’d play everybody on the left side of the infield, thinking I’d hit that ball to left field. But sometimes the pitcher still let the ball get inside, and if I hit it to right I could walk home. It would be a home run, because nobody would be there to catch the ball in right field. And the fans, even the opposing team I’m playing against, they’d yell, ‘Artie, pull the ball,’ because they wanted to see me run. But I just hit it where they pitched it.”

Though he hasn’t played professionally since 1962, Wilson still follows baseball avidly, rooting for the Los Angeles Dodgers. “They gave Jackie a chance to play, and that’s the reason we got a chance to get in there,” he says. “I give Jackie all the praise, and the Dodgers. That’s why I pull for the Dodgers now, even if they lose.”

Wilson also is a fan of Seattle shortstop Alex Rodriguez – “he’s a good shortstop, a smart ballplayer” – and has kept close tabs on Helton’s run at the .400 mark.

“He’s a good hitter,” Wilson says of Helton. “He hits every ball good. I like him because he’s not up there taking balls. If they’re strikes, he’s swinging. If he doesn’t let the pressure get to him, he could do it. He could hit .400.”

For Wilson, who hit .400 in near anonymity, the task is more difficult in today’s game “because every sportswriter, every newspaper, they want to write something about it. If he was like me, I wouldn’t even worry about reading the sports pages. If you’re under pressure to try and hit .400, going after pitches when normally you’d take them, then you start slowing down.”

Although few remember Wilson’s accomplishments today, he bears no grudges. “I’ve never had bad feelings toward anybody; I was just glad to be able to play when I did,” he says. “And I’m thankful to be alive and be able to read about Helton, to see him go for it. If he keeps swinging, you never know.”

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