With Atlanta Braves third baseman Larry Wayne Jones sitting on a .405 average going into tonight’s game against the Florida Marlins, many a baseball fan is wondering whether the man will hit .400. The easy and almost certainly correct answer is that no, he won’t. Hitting .400 in the modern game may not be a metaphysical impossibility along the lines of hitting .500, but it isn’t that far off. If he has no chance, though, that likely has less to do with his talent than with the shape of the game.

First, the killjoy part: Chipper is not going to hit .400 for the same reason that no one has done so since Ted Williams did 67 years ago, which is that it’s improbable in much the same sense that hitting a bullet with another bullet is. With 200 at bats so far this season, he projects for 596 on the year. To hit .400 given that much playing time, he’d need to rack up at least 158 more hits, which works out to a .399 average.

There are infinite permutations of this basic math, but none of them are encouraging for anyone who’d like to see some history made. For instance, say that Jones goes down to injuries for a long stretch later this summer — hardly an improbable scenario, given that the man hasn’t played a full slate in five years — and ends up with 499 plate appearances, the exact minimum number he’d need to qualify for the batting title, and 262 more than he has now. Assuming he walked, was hit by pitches and so on at the same rates he has so far this year, this would leave him with 225 at bats, in which he’d need 89 hits to end squarely at .400. That’s a .396 average.

Jones is a career .310 hitter; given the general tendency toward entropy that basically defines baseball, it’s probably more likely that he’ll hit .224 over the next four months than it is that he’ll hit .396. If you wanted to be extremely generous, you might say that the .375 average he’s run up since last June 1 is closer to his true talent level at this point, given his mastery of the strike zone, the advanced knowledge he has of all the league’s pitchers, and so on. Granting this, he’d still be much likelier to hit .354 than .396. Everything that rises must converge.

All of this daunting math obscures something more interesting about Jones’s preposterous run, which is that it’s exposing why the death of the .400 hitter has less to do with batting talent than with pure circumstance.

The main reasons why it’s impossible to reach baseball’s most mythic mark are quite plain. Most important is that much as the 60-home run campaign is basically an artifact of the steroid era, the .400 batting average was more or less an artifact of the early live ball era, when fielders hadn’t yet adjusted, in terms both of technique and equipment, to new realities of the game. Between 1921 and 1930, batters hit .400 seven times, which is one more time than all major league hitters managed between 1901 and 1920 and between 1931 and the present day. We can either conclude that all the best hitters for average in history peaked in the 1920s and that all the best home run hitters in history peaked in our own time, or we can acknowledge that all baseball numbers are a product of their time, to be viewed with a wary eye.

Under that wary eye, though, Jones looks even more impressive than he’s getting credit for right now. When Williams hit .406, to give an example, he hit 37 home runs and struck out 27 times in 143 games. To this day, there are fans, announcers, and writers who will hold up that sort of achievement in contact hitting as an example of the kind of greatness we just don’t see anymore.

Williams was unparalleled, of course, but his strikeout rate wasn’t the reason why. In 1941, the American League as a whole struck out in 9.1% of its plate appearances; the Splendid Splinter, in 5.9% of his, 64% of the league average. During the last year, Jones has struck out 10.5% of the time, against a league average of 17.3%, 61% of the average. In context, then, Jones has, of late, been better at putting the bat on the ball than Williams was in his prime — which is pretty impressive, even if he isn’t going to match that .406 average in large part because there is an absolute difference between a league where hitters strike out once every five or so at bats and one where they strike out once every 11.

That the context has changed — that there are twice as many strikeouts in today’s game because hitters swing harder and pitchers throw harder, because of specialized relief pitching and smaller parks that reward a home run swing — is what we really ought to take from a comparison of Jones to the mythic hitters of yore. Baseball changes over time; it gets harder, faster, and mainly it just becomes different, in an absolute sense. A game in which a Williams-class contact hitter strikes out more than an average hitter did in 1941, and in which he hits in small parks off pill-throwing short men toward nimble athletes with huge gloves, may not be one in which hitting .400 is possible. But that doesn’t mean that hitting .375 in it for a full year isn’t, in its own way, nearly as impressive an achievement.

tmarchman@nysun.com