Archive for September, 2010

Opening Your Eyes

Thursday, September 30th, 2010

Every week now I’m trying to write a blog entry, on either Thursday or Friday, because I work pretty much the rest of the week.  I work nights, so it’s not really practical for me to blog more frequently.  Besides, this is just something I do to express some ideas I have, or expansion on the ideas of others.  I am not someone who is going to post multiple times a day or even more than twice a week, because I feel not only that I would have less memorable posts, but also that it would become a giant time sink.  I would be spending hours, maybe more, every week just to maintain this thing.  And if I’m not making money from it, what is the payoff?  It’s not like I even want to make money from this blog.  I don’t feel like I’m saying anything special, other than the fact that I have a unique writer’s voice.  The ideas are as old as the hills, it’s just I’m expressing them in my own, unique way.  How many people have thought the same things I have and expressed them in their own way?  Millions.  Over the course of human existence, that is.

But I am not my ideas, because those ideas are not mine to begin with.  Nobody can own ideas.  Ideas are fluid.  It is the unique expression of those ideas that can be owned.  That is our gift to the world.  Our own perspective on things, on ideas.  That is what we bring to the table.  That is our uniqueness coming out.  And this is why every human has something to contribute.  (This is another bull shit, everyone is special post, when most people are not special, they are ordinary, but that is only because they have been conditioned not to think for themselves and to let the media and the government do all their thinking for them.)

Now I’m going to lash out at the world at large because that self-help shit really isn’t me.  No offense to those who got value out of  my posts about goal setting and following your passion.  My passion is exposing the world for what it is and how it takes from the wider world without giving back, and allows crimes of epic  proportions and we just sit there and accept it, or remain blissfully ignorant of it.  We accept what we are told by the media because nobody wants to put in the time and effort it would take to prove things wrong.  And when someone does prove that the “official story” or something is wrong, like Bush winning the election, people still believe it.  Or when 9/11 was debunked by quite a few people, they were viewed as heretics and unpatriotic, abominable to think our own government would attack itself.  If you know all the evidence, you’ll know that the WTC was an albatross, inefficient, and would need asbestos removal that would cost more than the original buildings.  Not to mention some guy just bought the building and put an insurance policy on it specifically for terrorist attacks less than a year before the “terrorist attack.”  And let’s not forget that Dick Cheney become head of NORAD, which had never happened before in the history of NORAD.  No elected official was ever put in charge of shooting down planes and for some reason, that was the time and Cheney was all, “Do NOT shoot that plane down!”  They removed all bomb sniffing dogs from the WTC 2 weeks before the collapse.  The buildings fell at near freefall speed, which is impossible for a steel-framed building unless it is being demolished with small charges at ever floor to lessen resistance to zero as the building collapses.

What happened to most of those who said something to the contrary about 9/11?  I’ll tell you what.  The people in high-ranking positions in journalism and politics were made a mockery of, many of them lost their jobs, and were told never to speak of it again.  Others were threatened and changed their official “scientific” findings.  9/11 is not about Muslim terrorists, it is about America wanting a fascist state of control and a reason to attack the middle east to get oil.  The people who are invested in the “official story” have everything to gain, while those who question it have everything to lose.  So it is a risky position, even to say that we trained Al-Quaeda is a risky position.  To say that Osama Bin Laden used to be a member of one of our government agencies is ludicrous.  But all of it is true.  They are hidden truths.  I have this theory that if even 1% of what we don’t know were let out, we would have a revolution.  But most people don’t want to know.  Better avert your eyes.  Why is it so few people truly want to know?

I’ll tell you why.  Because if they lied about that, what else did they lie about?  What other load of crap are they feeding us?  The government lies on a daily basis.  The government is not your friend.  Unless it is a friend who kills people and lies about it.  Big Brother is watching us almost everywhere we go now.  The PATRIOT Act was a total dissolvement of our freedoms in so many ways and we just stood there and took it.  People don’t have critical thinking skills, not even our leaders.  Not anymore.  The public education system, for the most part, creates a population that is a worker  bee, that will go along with the status quo or whatever the government is doing, because in school it is the same way.  Most people get their spirit broken in school.  Imagine 6 year old children forced to sit at a desk for the better part of 6 hours listening to a teacher drone on about mathematical equations when all they want to do is go outside and play and explore their world.  Even things that would be considered fun, such as kickball or singing a song is done under threat of punishment.  We are trained to do what those “above” us say and believe what they say as well.  We are conditioned since birth if our parents were really lousy and placed us in front of the television.  If they actually paid attention to us, we were conditioned since the start of school, the stupidity-manufacturing institution.  No wonder most people don’t really know what is going on in the world.  They don’t know that they don’t know that they are being conditioned and are being brainwashed on a daily basis by all forms of media.  They are told how to think, they believe what the media tells them to be true, even when it could be completely false.

Very few people take the time to question what they read or see on the television.  And that’s the problem.  If we actually did examine and pull the wool off of our eyes, we would see more than we could ever imagine seeing in this socially-conditioned state we are in now.  How the media placates us and gets us hung up on issues like whether or not a mosque should be built at Ground Zero, rather than focusing on the erosion of our freedoms of religion and speech.  The very things that are not reported in the media are the things that bear the most importance.  We never hear about secret societies that control the world on the news.  When was the last time they had the Bilderberg Group on the TV?  Or the Freemasons?  All this secrecy in the name of controlling people, and gaining more and more power, substituted in the form of money and land.  It is a power addiction that has led us to be left in the dark while those in power take everything and maybe throw us a little crumb every now and then.  They commit crimes of epic proportions, right out in the open and blame it on someone else.  As Napoleon said, “To be believed, make the truth unbelievable.”  And he’s right.  Most people can’t believe we attacked ourselves on 9/11 because it would shatter their reality.  It’s easier to believe that someone far, far away that hates us did that horrific act.  Not Uncle Sam.  Not our government, not people who live in this country and have for their whole lives.  It is just easier to believe that some brown people did it who believe in a foreign God that most people in this country don’t believe in or even understand.

It’s just so sad, because human beings have such a capacity for good, but also one for evil.  And when I use the words good and evil, I don’t mean in any religious sense.  I guess you could call them constructive and destructive.  Sane and pathological.  The choice of words is meaningless.  It’s just good and evil are better understood.  Fear and love are also easily understood, and so is love of power.  We have the capacity to create heaven on Earth, but most of us can’t because we would have to quit our jobs and possibly be homeless just to see our visions through.  The system has got us by the balls and we know it.  It is only through transcending the dominant system in small ways to start that we can begin to live autonomously, with the need for less and less from the system.  The system that lies to us and kills people.  Then we can finally begin to do good in ways that are good from every perspective.  For example, buying a piece of land and letting it run wild, like it should be.  That creates diversity and you could also live on it.  But in order to buy that land, you have to spend time in th dominant system earning money to get the land.  But once you have it, it is yours.

Dropping out completely is stupid, but the further you go, the more free you get.  If you no longer depend on your government for subsistence, then you are no longer complicit in what it does.  That is a nice bonus.  It’s not just the government, but those who control most of the world’s wealth.  When you no longer need much money, they can no longer control you either.  They can’t dangle money in front of you to silence you.  You have more integrity than that, now that you are outside the system, although you still take advantage of it in some ways.  I dislike the word dropout, because it still places the primary focus on the dominant, parasitic system, but what’s a better word?  Naturalist?  Minimalist?  Anarchist?  Anarcho-primitivist, although I don’t know if I want to go back that far.  I still want decent  shelter and some form of comfort.  I don’t want to have to try to sleep with bugs all over me.  Yuck.  What I’m looking for is a way forward where we lessen our dependence on government, technology, and hierarchical systems and start focusing on community and truly good values.  Values that come from love, not fear.  Get rid of fear completely and have a world just filled with love.  Will it take time?  Yes.  Are we ready for it now?  No way.  But is it possible?  Definitely.  We just have to make it happen.

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Posted in Anarcho-primitivism, Anti-establishment, Inspiration, Nature, Rants, Simplicity, Theories | No Comments »

Truly Following Your Passion

Thursday, September 23rd, 2010

Nobody knows what they want.  Well, not nobody, but most people.  Most people simply want what they are conditioned to want.  If you ask random people what the purpose of their life is, or what they want to accomplish in this life, the chances are you’ll get a laundry list of socially-conditioned answers, such as, “make a ton of money,” and “become famous.”  Another thing you’ll notice is that most people’s answers are very vague and don’t really have any direction.  There are those few, committed individuals that have the drive and the knowledge to accomplish what it is they truly want, but most people never take the time to acquire that knowledge in the first place.  Most people do what is safe, what will allow them to live comfortably, but not extravagantly.  They live paycheck to paycheck, which in its own right is stupid.  And their lives become one big recurring dream, where one day isn’t so different from another.  There is little excitement and even less passion.

Most people are beaten down by the world, by society.  They had dreams once, but now they don’t believe in them anymore, or somebody else told them it wasn’t possible for them.  Maybe they’ve outgrown their old dreams and have new ones, but don’t have the courage to pursue them.  Or maybe everyone and everything they’ve wanted to be was themselves, but you can’t make a living doing that, so we’re forced to place our unique selves into a box that will fit in society’s mold.  We may find something we are truly passionate about and can make a good living from, but that is the exception and not the rule.  ”Do what you love and the money will come,” is not a complete lie, it’s just that most people don’t love anything enough to put in the amount of time it would take to become proficient enough to make a career out of it.

It is said by some famous author that you need to put in 10,000 hours in a particular field to become an expert at it.  And these have to be quality hours.  Not half-assed hours.  Who here has that kind of commitment, self-discipline, and willpower?  Sure, you could also become a jack of all trades, and a master of none, which could also be useful, but at the same time you don’t really have an identity, other than the fact that you’re good at a lot of things, but not excellent at any one thing.  If you pour your time into one field, one focus, you can become more powerful in that vein than you could ever be from just dabbling in it.  To thrust yourself fully into something and commit to it for a long period of time (hopefully driven by interest and passion) is the very definition of mastery.  And if it is something you truly enjoy, it will be that much more fulfilling.

But how does one stay on a course like that for so long without diverting from it?  How do you stick with it?  You should pick something you love to do and that also can net you a career.  It has to be something that will serve others and will also serve you.  It’s okay to give more than you receive, but no self-sacrifice.  Don’t become another starving artist.  We all have the ability to contribute and to be compensated fairly for it.  We all have (for the most part) functioning brains that can aid us in making decisions about what it is we are supposed to do with our lives.  We know what we enjoy doing, but do we enjoy doing anything enough to turn it into a career?  Would we be able to stomach doing work in a certain field for decades?  As long as it doesn’t get too boring, and there is some kind of learning and self-discovery taking place, I would say yes to most fields out there.

When you dedicate your life to something, you know who you are.  When you pursue your passion, you become it.  You don’t question whether or not this is what you should be doing.  It is what you have to do.  The life inside you is forcing this out of you, and unless you completely ignore the life inside of you, there will be no stopping it once you know what your “purpose” is.  You will be unstoppable.  If you look at successful people, they decided what they wanted and they worked hard for it, but it was  worth it because the journey and the destination were just as rewarding.  It wasn’t just about the destination.  If that’s all that is keeping you on your current path, it is a path without a heart.  If you are not enjoying where you are on your journey right now, then what’s the point?  The point of life is to enjoy it.

The problem with most people is they never even find their passion.  They never even try to find their passion.  They don’t even know why they are here, other than the fact that their parents had sex.  They haven’t found anything worth pursuing, so they end up fulfilling other people’s purposes, others’ passions.  They become the cogs in someone else’s machine.  They become one of the facilitators or someone else’s goals, which unless you are in line with those goals as well, is inauthentic and shows that you truly have no direction, no sense of yourself, and that you are willing to adopt the goals and vision of some other person, whose motives you aren’t exactly sure of.  You are not really the author of your life then, are you?  You are more a supporting character in the game of life.  Which is suboptimal at best and downright stupid at most.

Now, I wouldn’t suggest quitting your corporate job right away, because you read this blog entry.  But what I would suggest is becoming more conscious in what it is you are supporting.  What it is you are actively engaging in.  And then I suggest you look for what truly stirs your soul and start to pursue that, while simultaneously still doing what you have to to make ends meet.  Do some self-exploration to find what it is you think you would most enjoy doing and try it out.  It is very important that you at least try to do this because otherwise, what kind of life are you living, fulfilling others’ goals while standing on the sidelines of life?  Is that really who you were meant to me?  An extra in the movie of someone else’s life?  Why not create a life that people make movies about instead?  It is at least worth a shot, I’d say.

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Posted in Inspiration, Intentions, Nature | 2 Comments »

Finding Out Who You Truly Are

Thursday, September 16th, 2010

I feel inspired to  write something here today, so here it goes.  I want to write something original.  Something that is truly me.  So, who am I and what do I have to share?  I am 24 years old, brown hair, blue eyes, around 6 feet tall, 175 lbs., a brain cancer survivor, a deep thinker, an introvert, a comedian, a writer, a blogger, a Nazi sympathizer (just kidding), a left-hander, a French Canadian ancestor, a CVS night shift employee, a minimalist (to a certain extent), an anarcho-primitivist, a personal growth enthusiast, a curious mind, an avid reader, and a naturalist.  I think I’ll stop there just to be polite.  I am not always all of these things, but from time to time, I am these things.  I am also more than these things, but not all the time.  We all are who we perceive ourselves to be, and as others perceive us to be.  It is a mix.  It is only in combining what you perceive of yourself and what others perceive of you that you can get a true picture of who you truly are.

Some things are entirely objective regarding who you are, while I would say most of the things people use to describe themselves are subjective.  It is all in the eye of the beholder.  I can call myself a deep thinker, and you may even have some objective experience to suggest this, but how do you know I am a deep thinker, other than these blog posts?  You are simply projecting an image of me, of my mind, of my personality from my blog or from some other interaction.  You can label me any way you want, and it will be right for you, but may be completely different from someone else.  Other people’s feedback is valuable when trying to figure out who it is you are.  When people ask the question, “Who am I?” they often only ask themselves.  This is a misguided approach that will severely limit your perspective.  Without feedback from others, how do you really know how others perceive you?  You are simply in a world of your own making.

You can ask people to give you their honest opinion of you and see which adjectives they use to describe you.  Hopefully, they are not “failure, loser, and indigent.”  You are better off getting your opinions from people who know you well and are straightforward with you.  Just say you are doing some market research.  You want to know what 25 people think of you and then you want to see which adjectives came up most and determine how people you know truly perceive you.  Some people love taking part in a survey.  And it’s not like you’re lying to them.  You’re doing market research to gauge what people think of you, and combining that with what you think of yourself to truly get the holistic sense of self that we’re all searching for.

Everyone puts labels on others, especially during first impressions.  Labels like old, young, middle-aged, fat, thin, average weight, and so on and so forth.  But it takes knowing someone for a good amount of time to truly know who they really are.  If you went by first impressions all the time, chances are you would be relating to people as if you didn’t know them, even if you’ve known them for years.  That would certainly be suboptimal.  At our core, we are pretty much all the same, but in our outer layers, we are most certainly unique.

Our ego is our defining quality that sets us apart from everyone else.  The ego may have caused quite a bit of problems throughout history, but the truth is that we all have one.  Whether it is a strong ego or a weak one is up to us.  How well do we express ourselves?  How much do we value our egoic pursuits?  I would have to say that people with a very strong ego tend to do well in society because society was created by those with a strong ego.  People who won’t back down and will fight to the death for what they believe.  Then there are those with a weak ego, who just kind of fade into the background, are the spectators of this world.  You aren’t stuck with the ego you got as a child, so you can train your ego to be stronger or atrophy it to be weaker.  It’s all a matter of wanting it bad enough.

Most of us define ourselves by our ego, and others most certainly do define you by your ego.  But when you think of who you are as a person, you have access to your true self behind the mask of ego.  You know yourself better than anyone else does.  Sure, some people may recognize patterns about you that you may miss, but for the most part, you know who you are better than anyone.  It’s just that feedback from others gives you a clearer picture of who you are that you might not be consciously aware of.  And it helps you form a more cohesive self, one that combines all opinions that truly matter.  But your opinion is always number one.  Others’ opinions are supplemental, as they are only seeing a partial picture.  They only see what you project, and nothing more.  You know much, much more about yourself than people on the outside looking in.

So, what am I driving at here?  Here’s what I am saying.  When trying to figure out who you are, don’t just rely on yourself.  Ask others for their opinions of you and see what they say.  Some of the things they say may shock you, but that is just their perception of you.  While it is not a completely accurate picture of you, other people’s perceptions of you help to understand how others see you in this world.  But they don’t know all of you.  They know only what you project to them.  You know more about who you are because you have access to all of yourself, whether or not you acknowledge it.  Other people simply see the top layer, maybe 2 layers deep.  You see much, much more of  yourself.  So, while I don’t advocate just using your own personal opinion of yourself to truly know who you are, I also say that you should take others’ opinions with a grain of salt, but also use them if they ring true to you.  If one adjective or class of adjectives keeps popping up, it’s pretty obvious that is the person you are projecting to the world.  And you can tweak who you are on the inside and the outside.  But that’s a topic for another day.

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The Human Cycle

Friday, September 10th, 2010

All human beings are mortal.  All human beings will eventually die.  We see it every day.  People die.  New people are born.  Thus the cycle of life.  Over one billion years of organisms being born and organisms dying.  Some species have lasted a long time, while others have perished rather quickly.  It is all impermanent, every species will ultimately meet its demise, including  us humans.  When the human species goes extinct, what will that mean for the rest of the world?  There will be nobody to record what is happening, no eyes of the world.  It will be something none of us will ever see, and yet I’m sure some of the most interesting things will happen, but with nobody to record it.  Sure, animals will recognize what is going on to some extent, but they will not be able to keep a record of the post-human future.  There will be no reason to keep a record because there will be no record keepers. It will be a world mostly lived in the present, with new and exciting things happening that are just accepted as is with no pre-judgment or negativity.

The freeways will start to crack open, and the skyscrapers will become home to thousands of animals.  Eventually, there will be no visible trace of any human structure.  It will be an animal’s world.  There will be no wars, no weapons, no fear, just existence.  The consciousness of the world at that point will be almost entirely present moment and there will be no regrets or worries.  Life after people will be very diverse and resilient.  It will also be abundant, due to the lack of a primary exterminator, us.  Everything will pretty much coexist in balance with everything else, and create a harmonious world that nature itself intended.

Whether us humans go extinct in 1000 years or 1,000,000 years, the fact remains that life will go on.  New species will flourish and ones that depended on us for the sustenance will suffer.  We will be gone and the rest of the species on this planet will simply be allowed to live.  They will be free in the most absolute sense.  Kind of like we used to be.  There will be no guidelines, no rules.  Just nature.  Just a diverse array of lifeforms competing for resources and territory, with safeguards to keep them from getting out of balance.  Without humans destroying natural habitats, many environments will come back that had previously been destroyed.  All it takes is a little time and nature always recovers.  So, maybe it’s not such a big deal that we are destroying the planet.  We will probably destroy ourselves before we ever get to destroying the entire planet.

I don’t think humans can get back into balance with nature.  I don’t think they can coexist with other creatures as equals.  We are just too smart at this point.  We know too much.  We know how to create these fantastic civilizations where we wield all the power over all other living things.  We can’t go back to what we once were.  It’s not that we can’t, it’s that we simply don’t want to.  Human life is good for a good portion of the people, although things are getting worse.  But the thought of living in a grass hut or a cave, catching our own food, and bathing in a lake just seem silly to us.  We’re smarter than that.  We can do things that other creatures cannot.  We have opposable thumbs, damn it!  We’re comfortable in our lives.  Our air is conditioned and we are shielded from extreme temperatures of any kind.  We are the kings of the world right now.  And we are really reluctant to give up our throne.

Our time will come and go, however.  Something will make humans extinct.  Be it a plague or a natural disaster, we will go extinct eventually.  Our throne will finally be vacant and will most likely stay that way for millions of years, or forever.  Human beings are nothing special, other than their intelligence.  If we didn’t have that, we would be goners in the wild.  How in the world would we hunt for food if we didn’t know how to make tools?  There are tons of theories on how we developed our superior intellect, but nobody truly knows for sure.  All we know is that it has allowed us to be at the top of the totem pole for tens of thousands of years and only now are we starting to pay for the exploitation and destruction of our home planet.  It’s just a pattern we’ve been running since grain agriculture and it just kind of got out of hand.  Now we have nearly 7 billion humans, who consume at the highest rate in history with most of them having no knowledge of the consequences of their actions.  But our cycle is reaching a tipping point if it already hasn’t.  Things are starting to get worse and there is nothing we can do about it.  Since we are consuming more than we can produce from the Earth, production will go down, as will consumption, which will lead to all sorts of economic  problems, which will lead to people being hungry, which may or may not cause a drop in population.

All I know for sure is that a world without humans will be a world where everything else is just allowed to be.  Sure, there will be competition, but there will not be extermination.  No animals are going to clear-cut forests.  They are not going to have nuclear power plants.  There will be no processed food or pharmaceuticals.  It will be a clean world, a natural world,  one where every organism has a chance to thrive, instead of just one species and the species who are considered useful to that one species.  No exploitation, no destruction.  Just pure life, the way nature intended it to be.

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Posted in Anarcho-primitivism, Anti-establishment, Nature, Theories | 2 Comments »

The Perfect .400 Hitter

Thursday, September 2nd, 2010

I’d like to divert from my usual topics to discuss one of my hobbies today.  Baseball.  The national pastime.  For those of you who are unfamiliar, baseball is a game played with a ball, a stick, and a baseball diamond.  I’m not going to get into all the rules here, as I’m sure someone else has already done this.  I’ve studied baseball history for about 15 years now and in that time, no one has come close to hitting .400 (that is, having a base hit in 40% of at bats).  Tony Gwynn in 1994 hit .394 in a strike-shortened season, but who knows which way he would have went if the season went all 162 games?  My guess is he would have ended up somewhere in the .370s or .380s.  No offense, Tony.  It’s just that the media pressure would have driven you crazy, much like what happened to Roger Maris in 1961 when he broke the single season home run record by one in a longer season than the previous record holder.  But if anyone could have done it, it would have been Gwynn.  He was a pure hitter, with little power and a knack for hitting line drives and a good eye.  His career batting average nears .340, which is the highest in the last 60 years.  And there’s the rub.

For the most part, people don’t hit for obscenely high batting averages anymore.  Why?  There are plenty of reasons, and I’ll start with what is the most prominent one.  Strikeouts.  Batters strike out quite a bit more than they did 70 years ago, when Ted Williams became the last baseball player to hit .400.  Statistics show that somewhere between 25 and 30 percent of balls put in play are base hits.  That would add around 20 or 30 points to someone’s batting average if they never struck out.  Pitchers are far more skilled than they were in the first half of the 20th century.  I’m not saying that there were no skilled pitchers back then,  just that there were fewer in proportion to the amount we have today.  They throw harder, have more movement on their pitches, and with the use of multiple relievers in a single game, there are fresh arms pitching the majority of the game as opposed to the 1900-1960s era where most starting pitchers pitched at least 20 complete games in a season.  There are specialist relief pitchers today who come in just to face one batter.  There are more pitches today than ever before.  The hitter is constantly guessing at which pitch out of dozens is going to be thrown.  Thus, there are many, many more strikeouts.

Every .400 hitter struck out less than 8% of the time in that respective season.  How many players today strike out less than 8% of the time?  It would be cumbersome for me to look that up, so I’ll estimate that it is probably between 1 and 5 percent of all Major Leaguers.  Also, it helps to walk quite a bit in a quest for .400.  The less at bats you accumulate, the better chance you have to hit .400.  Why?  Because that means you don’t have to get as many hits.  If you walk 100 times in a season, that is 100 plate appearances that don’t factor into your batting average.  It definitely pays to have a patient presence at the plate if you truly want to hit .400.  If you look at what Ichiro Suzuki did just a few years ago, breaking the single season hits record, you’ll understand what I mean.  He hit .372 that year, which is excellent, but he had over 700 at bats.  Not plate appearances, but at bats.  Granted, he is a leadoff hitter and would not have been able to break the record had he walked 100 times or hit much deeper in the lineup.  But he would have had a much better chance of hitting .400.  But he is not exactly a power hitter.  Pitchers don’t mind giving up a few singles, so I highly doubt Ichiro was intentionally walked much.  He has a threat of hitting the long ball, but for the most part, he is a contact hitter.  His speed and contact ability allow him to collect many infield hits, therefore padding his batting average to higher than your average player.  Speed is a definite advantage when it comes to hitting .400.  So, patience and speed are two other factors that would contribute to the creation of the perfect .400 hitter.  If you can steal some cheap hits with your speed and be patient enough to take a bunch of walks so that your at bats total goes down significantly, you are upping your chances for .400.

I would also argue that in this day and age, a player with respectable power would be more likely to hit .400.  Not your typical slugger, but someone who hits maybe 20-25 home runs a year.  Someone who will occasionally be pitched around to get to a weaker batter.  Obviously, a consistent hitter would also be at the top of the list.  Someone who has similar stats each year would be more likely to be able to reach the .400 mark due to their well-disciplined personality.  Somebody an awful lot like Ted Williams.  The year he hit .400, he also led the league in home runs.  He was known as both a power hitter and an average hitter, and struck out very infrequently.  He walked quite a bit, as his #1 ranking of all-time in on-base percentage shows.  Quite frankly, someone with his caliber would have a hard time hitting .400 today, but that doesn’t mean it is impossible.  Lady luck must be on your side if you ever hope to get into this exclusive club.  Certain flares that you hit must fall in.  You must accumulate at least 10-20 infield hits.  For some reason, you must be a left-handed batter.  Why?  Because left-handed batters have an advantage against right-handed pitching, which is still a majority to this day.  Both Wade Boggs and Tony Gwynn were left-handed batters and they both had the highest career batting averages of the last few decades.

It would also help to miss a small chunk of time if you are going to hit .400 for a season.  As long as you amass 502 plate appearances, you still qualify for the batting title and your record will be official.  I know it could be called cheating to some, as I was extremely mad in the 1990s when Mo Vaughn narrowly missed a batting title to go along with his 40 home runs due to rival New York Yankee Bernie Williams, who had much fewer plate appearances than Mo.  Not only that, Bernie Williams, on the final game of the season, went 2-for-2 and was taken out of the game.  Mo, who had over 600 at-bats, had a batting average that was within 0.2% of Mr. Williams, and came up short.  But for the .400 hitter, there will likely be no one even close in terms of BA.  So, no harm, no foul.  I would say between 550 and 600 plate appearances would be a good number, with maybe a 15 day disabled list stint placed somewhere during the season.  Look at Chipper Jones.  He won the batting title in 2008 with a mere 534 plate appearances due to I believe 2 stints on the 15 day DL.  .364 BA is nothing to sneer at.  He only had 439 at-bats, due to his patience at the plate.  90 walks certainly helps your batting title goal.

So, here are the criteria for the perfect .400 hitter:  A player who strikes out very little, walks rather frequently, has speed to beat out infield hits, has formidable power to attract intentional walks, has fewer than 600 plate appearances (although this is not a necessary requirement), and has to be a pretty consistent hitter, and most likely left-handed.  Or a switch hitter.  This would have to be someone who can avoid cold streaks and be able to rattle off some hot streaks.  It would also have to be someone with very thick skin, as the media can create a ton of pressure.  A player who can recognize pitches very easily, someone with the great eyesight of Ted Williams.  Not to mention a knack for being lucky when others are not.  So the question is:  Is there anyone playing in the MLB right now who I think could hit .400?

Right now, I just don’t see it.  I don’t see a single player who possesses all of these qualities to the extent necessary to truly put together a .400 season.  I could be wrong and someone might get lucky.  There are just so many factors that contribute to a season like this that it would take some sort of miracle for any current player to hit .400 for an entire season and qualify for the batting title.  It’s a long season, and you never quite know what’s going to happen.  Perhaps in the next 20-50 years, we’ll find someone who can accomplish this feat.  But I don’t want him to be handed this .400 crown, like a team out of contention giving him fastballs down the middle because they want him to succeed so badly.  I guess .400 is baseball’s version of the 4 minute mile.  Although, it kind of goes backwards instead of forwards.  The mile record is well below 4 minutes now, but it’s been almost 70 years since someone hit .400, and even before that, very few did.  It’s only been done 35 times, all before 1942.

I think we have a .400 hitter on the horizon, but I can’t say for sure.  If things fall right into place for a player having an already amazing season, then it can happen.  As for hitting .500, forget it.  We’ve got to hit .400 before we can even talk about .500.  Most of the .400 hitters did it before 1900.  That was when baseball was in its infancy.  Whoever eventually does this will have to be a superman.  And be extremely lucky.  But I have faith and so should you.

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