Luis Arraez hunts down one of baseball’s hallowed accomplishments and sports deities

All season, Luis Arraez was on the hunt for baseball immortals.

His batting average hovered around the vaunted .400 average, a standard not maintained during a major league campaign since Ted Williams in 1941.

Then, in mid-June, Arraez suddenly went three games without a hit. Three games! For him, that amounted to a catastrophic drought. His average dropped to .378.

Arreaz, 26, responded with a flurry. Against Washington, he went 5 for 5. Against Toronto, five times higher, five more hits. He kept the chart going during last weekend’s series against Pittsburgh.

Back to the .400 chase that Arreaz went on.

Major League Baseball’s rule changes, intended to make the game faster and better, dominated the story early in the season. But Arraez has emerged as a hero in the making – one who has begun shaping a season over the centuries.

He hits his singles and soft drives in Miami’s largely empty stadium and is little known. But if he stays above .400 after the All-Star break, his status will change. The pressure will build with each at-bat, just as it did for Williams, even in an era that relied on radio broadcasts and the slow running of dailies to tell the story.

In today’s world, every swing is digitized, streamed instantly around the world and analyzed by commentators and fans. Arraez will be known far beyond the realm of baseball fans.

Arraez, a five-foot-tall Venezuelan, is chasing more than one game from Williams, who finished that ’41 season with a .406 average. In 1947, Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color line, which had been in effect since the 1800s. No player has ever finished a season batting at or above .400 since Major League Baseball became an integrated game.

The pursuit of records has a magnetic way of captivating and drawing us in. That will always be the case.

Think of the ancient Greeks. There were no clocks or stopwatches in sixth-century BC Athens, but the Greeks kept a tally of the unparalleled number of victories achieved by athletes such as Milo of Croton, a wrestler who won gold medals in six Olympic Games.

And just as we are today, the ancient Greeks were obsessed with reputation.

“Imagine a world without Twitter, without newspapers or ‘SportsCenter’ highlights,” said David Lunt, an associate professor of history at Southern Utah University. “You just have these reputations, these stories that people tell about you. “Oh my god, you wouldn’t believe what this great athlete did.” And there were several ways they came to commemorate that.

Poems were made, songs were written, statues were erected. Thus, everyone knew that an athlete had set the limits of his performance.

Some things change with time, others don’t. Today, the record breakers are rewarded with multi-billion dollar careers, hundreds of millions of social media followers and, for the lucky few like Willie Mays and Wayne Gretzky, a statue in front of a stadium.

In February, a LeBron James jump shot toppled one of the biggest, most high-profile milestones in basketball: the most points scored in an NBA career – 38,387 – a record held by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar since 1985 and long considered unbeatable.

Honoring Kareem brings back memories of other athletic masters and the records they hold.

Wilt Chamberlain, with his game of 100 points, the most scored in the NBA

Bill Russell, with his 11 NBA titles, the most a player has won in the league.

Milestones have a certain kind of magic. They exist on a continuum, honoring unparalleled excellence while inviting future generations to join the chase.

So it is that Margaret Court’s record of 24 Grand Slam titles is reminiscent of Serena Williams’s heartbreaking pursuit of 23 deadlocked, prompting Novak Djokovic, who won his 23rd Slam event at this month’s French Open and Court at Wimbledon could match.

There are records that seem unbeatable – only to be felled by the wrecking ball of a single thrilling, stunning outlier of a performance. At the Olympic Games in Mexico City in 1968, Bob Beamon set such a record in the long jump, jumping almost two feet higher than the previous world record holder.

Then, in 1991, Mike Powell came along, who captured the mark by jumping 29 feet 4½ inches, two inches past Beamon.

It’s been 32 years and Powell’s performance still sets the standard. For now.

Then there are milestones that aren’t really records, but are starting to look like them.

When the subject of the elusive .400 marks, you might think that Williams was not only the last to reach that average, but also the first. However, you would be wrong. Dozens of major league players, including Ty Cobb, reached that level before Williams.

But Williams and Cobb’s major leagues, and thus their records, will forever be tarnished by the scourge of racism. That’s why, if Arraez keeps up his hot streak and hits .400 or more for the season, he should be hailed as the first big leaguer ever to actually hit that mark – a baseball immortal.

Do you remember Milo of Croton? He is said to have gone to war wearing the olive crowns he won for his Olympic records – along with a lion skin and club that made him look like the god Hercules.

An important detail of that story is probably the metaphor, said Heather Reid, a philosophy professor who studies the ancient Greeks and their relationship to sports. The wrestling champion probably wasn’t wearing his Olympic crowns, which in ancient times were made of olive branches for a reason: they disintegrated, a nod to the fleeting nature of life.

And that points to a fundamental connection between ancient and modern sports. Then and now records represent a “study within the bounds of human excellence,” as Reid suggested.

Mortals push the boundaries, making them look like gods for a time. Until someone comes along to knock them off the pedestal. That’s why we’re watching.

During last weekend’s series against Pittsburgh, Arreaz averaged .401 as he threw pitch after pitch for hits and even hit his third home run of the season. A 1-for-4 Sunday parked him back at .399.

If he can ride the season’s swoons and get above .400, it’s time for a statue in front of Miami’s stadium. Plus a poem, a song and maybe an olive crown.