This holiday weekend, there will no doubt be many a beery toast made over many a flaming grill to Atlanta third baseman Chipper Jones and his run at .400. And why not? We all want to see the impossible, and having bettered .390 for more than half a season now, Jones just might show it to us. Still, I feel constrained to point out that, if a feat’s quality is to be judged by its rarity, Jones’s run at history is only the second-most impressive being made this year. Someone, somewhere, ought to hoist a pint to Oakland left fielder Jack Cust. He deserves it.

If hitting .400 makes you a legend, there should certainly be some reward for pulling a harder trick, which is what Cust, 29, is on pace to do. Last year, he led the American League by striking out an amazing 164 times in just 124 games, and finished just six behind Boston’s David Ortiz for the walks lead with 105. This year, he’s leading the AL in both categories, and he stands a very good chance of doing so at the end of the year. That may not sound like much, but only eight men have done it before, a total of 11 times. In the modern era, by comparison, hitting .400 has been as easy as getting a parking ticket, as eight men have done it a full 13 times. By the principle of scarcity, then, Cust stands ready to easily trump Jones on the last day of the season, even if the latter succeeds beyond expectations.

While not quite as rarefied as the list of .400 hitters, incidentally, the list of those who have won this double crown is more than a little impressive. Babe Ruth did it four times, while Hack Wilson, Dolph Camilli, Mickey Mantle, Mike Schmidt, Dale Murphy, Jim Thome, and Jason Giambi did it once apiece. Any list on which Camilli — an incredible player for the old Brooklyn Dodgers who likely would have made the Hall of Fame had he caught some early breaks in his career — is clearly the worst player is a fine list, indeed. Cust will stand with immortals.

Cust, of course, shouldn’t even be mentioned with these other players. A career .242 BA/.388 OBA/.458 SLG hitter who, as a fielder, makes a fine designated hitter, he may be useful enough, but he has a lot more in common with Mets minor leaguer Val Pascucci than he does with Giambi. Still, there’s a lesson to be learned here, and it has less to do with what Cust is doing this year than what he hasn’t been doing for years, and what Pascucci, unaccountably, isn’t doing now: Playing in the majors.

At the dawn of the aughts, Cust, then in the Arizona system, may have been the minor league prospect who seemed most likely to hit 400 home runs, but from his earliest days in the minors, his great strengths sat alongside some brutal weaknesses. At 19, for instance, he ran up a preposterous .528 on base average in 73 games in rookie ball, walking 86 times, but he also struck out 71 times. Nineteen-year-olds with those kinds of contact problems are going to have their problems as they move up the ladder, and sure enough, Cust struck out 455 times in 389 games in the next three years as he worked his way up to Class AAA. The Diamondbacks, having played him in a grand total of three games, traded him to Colorado, where he hit .169 in 65 at bats, a record which doomed him to a long period of wandering.

He was traded to Baltimore, where he played in the minors behind the likes of Jeff Conine and B.J. Surhoff; he signed with Oakland, and later with San Diego. Between those three teams he played in a combined five major league games between 2004 and 2006, during which time he provided ample proof at Class AAA that he was capable of drawing 100 walks, hitting 25 home runs, and striking out a genuinely unbelievable number of times. Cust finally got his big break last year, when Oakland traded for him as an emergency replacement for injured DH Mike Piazza, and he promptly hit six home runs in seven games, but if not for those two bits of good fortune, he’d probably be toiling away in Portland or someplace similar. Granting that Cust is no great player, it’s obvious not only that he’s a decent enough one, but that he was all along. All those teams that wouldn’t give him a shot all those years weren’t exactly wrong about his weaknesses — he’ll never hit for average because he strikes out so much, he’s no dominant power hitter, his numbers are more impressive on paper than on the field, and he’s prone to getting chewed alive by major league hitters for weeks at a time — but they were wrong about how much they mattered. And so here he is, writing his name in the record books alongside Ruth and Mantle. It’s worth a toast.

tmarchman@nysun.com