Ted Williams was the last man to hit .400 in a full season. He did it in 1941. Nobody has done it since.

He also lost nearly five full years to military service — World War II and Korea. He flew combat missions in both. He still hit 521 home runs and retired with the highest career on-base percentage in MLB history — .482. He reached base nearly half the time he stepped to the plate, for 19 seasons. The numbers he produced with five years missing from his career are almost incomprehensible.

Many consider him the greatest hitter who ever lived. The argument is hard to refute.

None of that is the interesting part.

The interesting part is how he thought about hitting.

Williams was obsessive about mechanism. He didn’t think about hits. He thought about the swing — specifically, about which pitches his swing was worth making. He divided the strike zone into 77 cells, each the size of a baseball, and assigned a batting average to each one. Not estimates. Career data, internalized over two decades of professional at-bats.

The result was a heat map of human performance across a defined space, with specific costs assigned to specific locations.

He knew that swinging at a pitch on the outer low corner dropped his average to .230. Swinging at a pitch in his sweet spot — inner third, waist high — he hit .400. So he took strikes. Deliberately. Happily. Pitches that were technically in the zone but not in his zone, he let go.

He published the whole framework in 1971. He called it The Science of Hitting.

Interesting title, Ted.

The managers didn’t like it.

Pitchers didn’t like it. Teammates didn’t like it. From the dugout, a hitter who watched a strike go by looked like he wasn’t trying. A hitter who swung and missed at least competed. At least showed effort. At least gave you something to work with.

Williams was measuring outcomes per pitch location. That’s invisible. You can’t see it from the dugout. So his discipline looked like passivity, because nobody had the framework to see it as precision.

Here’s the thing: the managers weren’t wrong about what they were seeing. They were wrong about what they were measuring.

They were counting swings. Swings are visible, countable, demonstrable. The metric was obvious and the metric was wrong, and the wrong metric produced the wrong conclusion, and the wrong conclusion got defended loudly because it was backed by everyone in the room.

Williams was right. Analytics eventually confirmed everything he said, just with larger datasets and more expensive software. The critics didn’t concede. They became irrelevant.

Court reporting has been doing the same thing for many years.

The profession measures strokes. Strokes are visible, countable, teachable. A brief that produces output in one stroke looks efficient. If you can write “the defendant” in a single stroke instead of two, that looks like progress. That looks like speed. The instructors point to it. The students chase it.

The cost of memorizing that brief is invisible. The cost of retrieving it under pressure — hostile room, crosstalk, technical testimony at speed — doesn’t show up in the count. The cost of a misfire, and the recovery time that follows, doesn’t appear in the measurement. Neither does the cumulative weight of carrying thousands of exceptions in working memory through a six-hour deposition.

So the profession keeps defending the brief, because the brief looks fast.

The dropout rate in court reporting programs runs between 80 and 90 percent. That number has been stable for decades. The profession has tried to solve it with better instruction, stronger motivation, more practice. The one thing it hasn’t tried is measuring the right things.

What Williams understood — and what took the rest of baseball 30 years to catch up to — is that visible effort and productive effort are not the same thing.

His contemporary was Joe DiMaggio. DiMaggio has the mythology — the 56-game hitting streak, the marriage to Marilyn Monroe, the monument in Monument Park. Williams has the math.

DiMaggio’s streak is the most famous record in baseball. Williams’s .482 on-base percentage is the best in history. The streak was one extraordinary run. The on-base percentage was every single day, for two decades.

Streaks get remembered. Consistency builds careers. The profession has been chasing the streak — the brilliant brief, the one-stroke miracle, the student who figures it out and runs — when the goal was always the career.

A swing is effort. A walk is discipline. From the outside they look nothing alike. In the box score, the walk scores the same run.

In steno, a brief is effort. A phonetic stroke is discipline. The brief looks more impressive. It takes more memorization, more retrieval, more mental overhead to maintain. The phonetic stroke is less dramatic and more reliable, and reliability is what gets you through a six-hour depo when fatigue sets in without your accuracy falling apart.

The Science of Hitting is still in print. It has been for 50 years. It endures because it was right — not because it was popular, not because it was immediately accepted, but because it had numbers behind it and the numbers didn’t lie.

The Science of Steno is almost ready for release. Get ready, because it’s going to prove a lot of people wrong just like Ted did.

Williams figured out, before the analytics era existed, that the people criticizing his approach were measuring the wrong things. He didn’t argue with them. He kept taking the strikes, kept hitting .400 in his sweet spot, and let the results make the case.

He did it in the 1940s. No spreadsheets. No databases. No video replay. He built the framework out of his own attention, and when he finally wrote it down, it became transferable to everyone who wasn’t Ted Williams.

The absence of tools never stopped him from doing science. It just meant the science waited longer to get written down.

Thirty-seven years at the steno machine is a different kind of index card.

That’s the book he wrote.

It’s also the book you’ll be reading soon.

Tom Fernicola has been a court reporter for 37 years. He is the creator of the BREVITY stenographic system and the author of The Science of Steno: Why Court Reporting Is So Hard — and What the Math Proves. He works in New York City.