With one day left in the 1941 season, Ted Williams was batting .399 and a fraction, which would have gone into the record book as .400 had he sat out. He played both games of the doubleheader in Philadelphia on September 28 and went 6-for-8. He finished at .406, and no major leaguer has reached .400 over a full season since.
He could have sat out the last day at .400. He played both games and went 6-for-8.
The card that was in packs that year is the last Play Ball. Gum, Inc. made 72 cards in 1941, in two series, sold two to a pack with a stick of gum for a penny, and for the first and only time printed them in color. The pictures were the ones from the 1940 set, colored in and set on bright backgrounds with a touch of art deco, and the old nameplate of glove and bat gave way to a plainer banner.
Williams is number 14, a portrait from the chest up in a Red Sox cap, smiling, the banner reading “Ted” Williams, with the nickname in quotation marks the way the set liked to print them.
It was a season worth a card. Beyond the .406 there were 37 home runs, 120 runs batted in, an on-base percentage of .553 that no one topped in the twentieth century, and a ninth-inning home run that won the All-Star Game, 7–5. He still finished second to Joe DiMaggio in the voting for Most Valuable Player.
The set came out with war coming. Its second series is believed to have been issued in 1942, and it was the last set made under the Gum, Inc. name; the company's later baseball cards carried the name Bowman.
