The guy was just sitting there on the couch. Watching television. Reading a magazine feature on Chipper Jones.

Same as lots of baseball fans across the country this summer.

Except, this was smack in the middle of Atlanta's clubhouse earlier this month. And the guy devouring the facts of Chipper's baseball life? It was only making him feel more inferior.

"For all of us," Atlanta outfielder Jeff Francoeur said. "He makes us feel like we suck sometimes."

Yes, well, welcome to Chipper's neighborhood. One of the sweetest spots in the game.

"We get one hit," Francoeur moaned. "And he gets three. You look how good a year Lance Berkman is having, and he's 40 points behind Chipper."

Until about 10 days ago, the game's biggest buzz emanated from discussions on whether Jones could keep that .400 average going deep into the season. With the home run section of baseball's record book resembling a burned-out moonscape after the dinosaurs became extinct in the aftermath of the Steroid Era, .400 has re-emerged as one of the game's Holy Grail touchstones.

Ted Williams, back in 1941, remains the last man to have conquered it. Jones was at .400 through last Thursday, but the combination of a quadriceps injury and facing American League pitchers with whom he was unfamiliar pushed him back to .394 as Jones and the Braves prepare for this weekend's series in Toronto.

Not .400, but close enough to dream with plenty of season left.

"It's incredible," Braves catcher Brian McCann said. "It's like watching what a lot of us did in high school -- and he's doing it against the best pitchers there are."

Jones is 36, came into the season a career .307 hitter and is coming off of a single-season, career-high of .337 in 2007. He was hitting .420 on June 7 when he aggravated a small tear in his right quadriceps, and the injury has become more problematical since. He has not been in the lineup for the past five games, though he has pinch hit in two of them.

Despite facing AL pitchers -- Williams and Co. didn't have to see interleague pitching in the 1940s and 1950s -- the quadriceps tear might be the most difficult opponent for a man who has battled toe, knee, hamstring, ankle and oblique strains and tears during an All-Star and battle-scarred career.

During a conversation earlier this season, with Jones batting well over .400, one scout broke down his scorching start very simply.

"He's finally got his legs under him," the scout said.

Jones nodded in agreement when I passed that analysis along to him during a chat not long ago, agreeing that, yes, until this quad injury flared up, he had been feeling as good physically as he has felt in years.

"It's been great to go out and do some things I was doing in my late 20s and early 30s before I had this rash of injuries," Jones said. "Yeah, to have all of your faculties, you're able to do things that come naturally to you.

"I wanted to get to the point where people would stop talking about me in terms of being over the hill, or dropping off. To be talking about (.400) through the middle of June is awfully gratifying."

There was a night in Pittsburgh in early May when few would have dared mention Jones in the past tense. Forget Letterman or postgame snacks. Batting over .400 at the time but still unhappy with his swing, Jones recruited a couple of coaches to throw late-night batting practice.

"Game over, everyone was showering or eating, ready to get out, and we're in the cage banging it," Atlanta batting coach Terry Pendleton said.

His eyesight is legendary -- teammates are amazed at how far away he can read the crawl on the bottom of the television screen -- his hand-eye coordination terrific and his baseball IQ is astronomical.

But do you know what Jones fingers as his most important attribute?

"Probably my knowledge," he said. "My ability to recall how pitchers worked me, their success against me or mine vs. them. Being able to anticipate and adjust.

"Physically, I'm not going to get 30 base hits with my legs. My bat speed is probably middle of the pack. A lot can be said for being able to go back weeks, months, years and be able to recall certain things that will help you in a particular at-bat tonight."

Some hitters are guess hitters. Jones, decidedly, is not. When he makes contact with a pitch, how often was it the pitch he was looking for?

"I'd say 60 to 70 percent of the time," he said. "I'm going to form a game-plan before the at-bat ever starts. Watch a guy on tape. See how he pitches similar hitters.

"From there, I'll pick out one pitch I can do damage with. The whole key is waiting on that pitch. Sometimes it takes five or six pitches to get it.

"Obviously, with two strikes, everything is out the window."

Know how often you hear someone say that it's going to take a young player a few years to learn the league?

Jones estimates that it took him "seven or eight" years in the majors to reach this point, to where he knows enough about his craft and the opposing pitchers to look for a particular pitch each at-bat.

Not that most hitters -- or even a high percentage of them -- ever reach that point. Part of why he leans so heavily on his knowledge is that, essentially, Jones possesses photographic memory.

"Definitely," Pendleton says.

Not that Jones doesn't utilize video as well to scout an opposing pitcher -- especially one he hasn't faced. When he runs into those situations, he'll often watch how the pitcher worked a hitter similar to him. Maybe Albert Pujols, or Lance Berkman.

"It's been amazing, to tell you the truth," Pendleton said of Jones' run this season. "For a guy to do that from both sides of the plate, to be this consistent ..."

Prevailing wisdom for years has had a left-handed hitter as having the best chance at hitting .400, because lefties have a two-step head-start toward first base, and it's probably going to take some infield hits mixed in to get to .400.

But where Jones isn't appreciated enough for his 402 homers or .300-plus lifetime average is, as a switch-hitter, it essentially takes twice as much work to make sure the swing is fine-tuned from each side.

What also isn't appreciated enough about Jones is this: His .307 career average ranks second all time among the game's switch-hitters, trailing only Hall of Famer Frankie Frisch's .316. Think about that one for a minute.

"Pretty cool," said Jones, who grew up in Jacksonville, Fla., idolizing a couple of Hall of Fame switch-hitters, Mickey Mantle and Eddie Murray.

"Those are the two names I grew up wanting to be mentioned with," he said. "I've got a ways to go, but we're getting there. Slowly but surely."

Since 2000, only one other man has taken a run at .400 deeper into the season than Jones' June 19 (so far) -- Nomar Garciaparra, then playing with Boston in 2000. He was hitting .403 on July 20. And he was not enjoying it.

"Constantly got hounded about it, and it was annoying as hell," said Garciaparra, still flinching at the memory even today. "Didn't matter if we were in Boston, or wherever we went on the road. To me, it wasn't about me, it was about winning. It didn't matter if I was at .400, it was just, 'Go out and try to do something today to help the team win.'"

Garciaparra finished the season at .372, "and went home bitter, upset and could have cared less because we didn't make the playoffs."

Even at .394, Jones still is within range of .400. And hey, what are summer daydreams for if not envisioning somebody jockeying with the .400 mark as the days fall off of the calendar one of these Septembers?

"He's almost like a frickin' leadoff hitter," said Andruw Jones, Chipper's former teammate in Atlanta who now plays for the Dodgers. "One year he struggled, hit something like .260 (.248, actually, in 2004), and even watching him that year, I still thought he was getting on base every day."

Of course, as we've witnessed over these past seven days, the odds are stacked against. Even Chipper said he doesn't think he'll be the guy to crack .400 -- if or when it ever happens.

"Personally, I think it's going to take somebody who is able to get 50, 60, 70 infield base hits," he said. "Someone with a keen eye who draws a lot of walks and keeps his number of at-bats down.

"Not many in this game can do that. Ichiro (Suzuki in Seattle) can get 240 hits, and 50 or 60 infield hits, but he'll have 700 plate appearances and doesn't walk a lot. I've got two infield base hits. I have to drive the ball into the outfield to get my hits.

"Sixty, 70 years ago, starting pitchers pitched 350 innings and you could count on facing a guy four or five times a game. It was a lot easier in the sense that there was more time to make adjustments.

"Now, you see a starter three times tops, and then usually I get the lefty specialist because they want to turn me around and have me bat right-handed, then I get the closer."

So he drags his .394 average and still-sore quad into this weekend's series in Toronto -- where interleague play, if ever so briefly, will turn in his favor. Jones likely will take advantage of AL rules to serve as Atlanta's designated hitter. Even if he can't run, he can still pop it -- his 16 homers lead a club clinging to postseason aspirations, and his 46 RBI are second to Mark Teixeira's 57.

Four-hundred? Maybe someone will do it one day. Maybe even, against the odds, it will be Chipper.

But the Braves are 3-10 without him in the lineup, and they're too dependent on him for too many other things for him to obsess over .400.

"I can't because, see, you start thinking about protecting your average, you get away from doing the things you're paid to do -- hit the ball out of the park, start rallies, end rallies," Jones said. "The last thing I want to become is a singles hitter. I know my job."