Another Sign Batting Average Is Becoming Obsolete
One of the great batting lines of the first half was Yasmani Grandal’s .189/.388/.436 slash. Unfortunately, as has been the case for many a hitter on the White Sox, his return to action in ‘21 is in doubt after he underwent surgery to repair a knee ligament. I won’t wax poetic on Grandal; Devan Fink did a great job covering his early-season batting line. But it’s becoming more common to see a hitter with an average that starts with a “1” these days. The common reference to a batting average under .200 is the “Mendoza Line,” which our Ashley MacLennon made a strong case for ditching as a reference earlier this season. I, on the other hand, am going to make the case for why it’s become irrelevant.
Batting average, the prevailing measure of a hitter’s success for most of baseball’s existence, has faded into the background, yet the rate at which a hitter successfully reaches base via a hit is still usually the first statistic reported. Grandal’s batting average is not good, but the selection of .200 as a cutoff point is arbitrary; after all, a batting average of .214 is also not good. What most baseball fans understand now is that because all base hits are not equal in value, batting average is limited in what it says about a hitter. But there is a stigma attached to a poor batting average, which is probably why the Mendoza Line has stuck.
Let’s rewind to last year’s shortened campaign. There was a lot of speculation going into a 60-game season as to whether or not a player would be able to hit .400. That didn’t happen, though Charlie Blackmon was hitting .500 after a couple weeks. We did end up with a handful of qualified hitters with an average below .200 — seven such, to be exact:
| Name | Tm | PA | AVG | wOBA | wRC+ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Max Muncy | LAD | 248 | 0.192 | 0.316 | 100 |
| Joey Gallo | TEX | 226 | 0.181 | 0.297 | 86 |
| Matt Olson | OAK | 245 | 0.195 | 0.316 | 103 |
| Kyle Schwarber | CHC | 224 | 0.188 | 0.307 | 91 |
| Bryan Reynolds | PIT | 208 | 0.189 | 0.278 | 72 |
| Evan White | SEA | 202 | 0.176 | 0.261 | 66 |
| Yoshi Tsutsugo | TBR | 185 | 0.197 | 0.309 | 98 |
This is by far the highest number of qualified hitters with a batting average below .200 for a single season. It is totally a product of the short season, though. None of the hitters on the list above are contact hitters, but their true bat-to-ball skills are probably better than what they showed in ‘20. When the sample is small, there is a greater chance that you get some outliers in your results.
So if we’re filtering out hitters by the definition of qualified (at least 3.1 plate appearances per game), this distinction for the 2020 season doesn’t say a whole lot. That does seem like a lot of hitters who are getting innings every day, though, despite really poor contact. If we reduce the minimum number of plate appearances to 100, we can make a more appropriate comparison to previous seasons.
A total of 38 players with over 100 plate appearances during the 2020 season had averages at or below .200. So far this season, that number is 50, though as the season continues and players with a history of better contact than they’ve shown this season so far (e.g. Cody Bellinger, Ian Happ) get more plate appearances, that list should get shorter.
As you can see from the chart above, front offices and managers seem to have become more comfortable with sub-.200 hitters in recent years. These numbers fluctuate a bit from season to season, but at a macro level, there is a recent trend towards more hitters who bat below .200. That number has doubled in the last decade; compare it to the 1980–2010 period, when it was relatively stable.
| Decade | Average Number of sub-.200 Hitters | League-wide Batting Average |
|---|---|---|
| 2011-2019 | 38.8 | 0.257 |
| 2001-2010 | 18.2 | 0.269 |
| 1991-2000 | 16.1 | 0.270 |
| 1981-1990 | 19.9 | 0.262 |
This season started off slow for hitters — historically slow. That makes sense; pitchers are throwing harder, and teams are getting better at leveraging analytics to implement shifts and take away hits. But contact is not valued as much as it was in prior seasons. There is a good chance that Eugenio Suárez, Paul DeJong, and Grandal (were he not injured) end the season with a batting average below .200 with their teams still satisfied with the overall results. As you can see from the list of 2020 players under .200, with enough power and walks, it’s not unreasonable to expect that a sub-.200 hitter could provide value; Muncy, Olson, and Tsutsugo were all near league average in wRC+.
How is this possible? As long as any vacated hits are mostly singles, there is little harm done. Take Olson for example. Despite hitting just .195 last season, he hit 5.7 home runs per 100 plate appearances, which is slightly below his career average. His walk rate was also 13.9%, a small bump over his career average of 11.0%. It was still his worst hitting performance in the big leagues, but he gave the A’s value at the plate despite the poor batting average.
Grandal is a more extreme case of this:
| Split | AVG | TB/PA | BB+1B/PA | 2B/PA | HR/PA |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 0.188 | 0.565 | 0.313 | 0.012 | 0.057 |
| Career | 0.237 | 0.520 | 0.261 | 0.039 | 0.044 |
Most of our readers probably look to wOBA and wRC+ as the primary aggregate hitting statistic to evaluate a hitter’s performance. These statistics appropriately weight the outcome of a plate appearance, rewarding hitters for extra-base hits. The increased propensity of sub-.200 hitters is just a natural consequence of an increased appetite for power hitting. The rate of singles hit per plate appearance has gradually gone down (from 17.1% in 1980 to 13.6% in ’21), but home runs have gone up (1.9% versus 3.2%). These rates both have a linear relationship with the number of sub-.200 hitters (plotted below).
To translate those rate changes, that’s a loss of 3.5 singles per 100 plate appearances in exchange for a gain of 1.3 home runs per 100 plate appearances — a net gain of 1.7 total bases per 100 plate appearances.
Even though it’s becoming obsolete, batting average still leads the slash line and gets printed on the back of baseball cards. But in today’s game, it might make more sense to pay attention to a minimum home run threshold. The number of hitters with a goose egg in the home run column is certainly in decline: six hitters in the last full season (2019) with at least 100 plate appearances, compared to 36 from the 1980 season. (Watch out David Fletcher, this one could get named after you.)
MLB is making efforts to bring more contact to the game; if it’s successful, this trend may begin to reverse. But until that happens, we will continue to see power trump contact. Embrace the slash line that starts with a 1; it’s here to stay (at least for a while).
Chet is a contributor for FanGraphs. Prior to FanGraphs, he wrote for Purple Row. When not writing about baseball, he is a data scientist and outdoor sport enthusiast. He can be found on Twitter at @cgutwein.
If batting average were still truly a thing, I’d propose creating a “Personal Mendoza Line” that shows what a player’s BA would need to be to put them at replacement level. So for example, Jackie Bradley Jr. might have a Personal Mendoza Line of .160, while Lourdes Gurriel might have a .240 Personal Mendoza Line. I’d have to think guys like Grandal, Gallo, Zunino, etc. might have Personal Mendoza Lines closer to .100 than .200.
If you had a player like 2004 Bonds, where he walked or got plunked in 39% of PAs, could he conceivably have a negative Mendoza threshold?
2004 Bonds with zero hits would still be worth about 1.1 WAR. My (possibly incorrect) back of napkin math says he would need to hit about -.025 to be replacement level. Maybe he can go out and take a few hits away from AJ Pierzynski.
Of course, he wouldn’t get all those walks if he never hit the ball.
Thanks, Chet! This is a great article, and very timely as I’ve watched the A’s collection of low 200’s hitters have decent success this year. I’d be curious to see a related article about the number of players in each season who hit at or below their weight. I suspect it’s at an all time high.
Bahhh…if you hit 200…you suck..period
[old man yells at cloud]
Here’s a link to an article that explains why that isn’t true.
https://blogs.fangraphs.com/another-sign-batting-average-is-becoming-obsolete/
It’s an interesting read. You might want to check it out.
Zunino is going to put up 4 war and hit below .200.
For his career, Zunino has hit just over .200 and put up 16.4 WAR. That’s more than Sean Casey did over 12 seasons with a career .302 average and over 1,500 hits (15.2 WAR).
You’re right, but wRC+ is a superior metric (or, at least, a superior prima fascia hitting comparison). It’s more fun AND interesting (and accurate) to say, “See how Zunino managed to be more valuable than Casey in spite of a 83 wRC+ because he was such a good catcher!?” and “Sure, Casey could hit, but he was a literal statue, even when allegedly running the bases, and if you’re gonna field like my dead grandmother, then you better hit like Barry Bonds”
A thumbs up for those who can’t see this comment was made with tongue on cheek.
You may not suck, but you’re boring as hell.
I understand that’s what analytics says. But I wouldn’t complain about rule changes that would make teams value batting average more than they do currently. Base hits are fun.
I don’t know why you’re getting downvoted for this, because I find it undeniable that a brand of baseball where a sub .200 average is tolerable tends to be a lot more boring to watch. As a viewer, I’d trade in some homers in exchange for singles every day of the week. It leads to more engaging baseball.
I think many of us agree with the sentiment but don’t trust rule changes by MLB/MLBPA to do anything but exacerbate problems (since their solutions are explicitly and solely profit-driven).
That said, I’ve never found Max Muncy boring at all, and I’m thrilled he’s going to the ASG. If only they’d extend the DH to the NL already (seemingly the EASIEST way to improve offense).
Muncy was decidedly more boring in 2020 than he has been any other year though.
Yes, when players are hurt and underperform, they’re not as fun to watch. No advanced analytics needed for that assessment.
See I personally love home runs. They are still my favorite part of the game. I would love to see more contact though. My concern is that I can’t see it returning without drastic rule changes. I understand that people think about their era as the Golden era, but most of the reason for the strikeouts is that the pitchers are just much better than ever before. Sure the approach matters somewhat, but in the 90s #2 starters threw 88 w 73 mph curves, and the goal then was to keep the ball low, and no one talked about spin rate. Not only were those pitches much easier to hit, they were thrown with the intentional goal of getting ground balls.
The future rule changes that we are likely to see are simply going to further the tto as well. For example robot umps are going to eliminate framing and catchers will always be set up to throw which will drastically cut down on stolen bases, and the guys that stay behind the plate will basically always be guys who can throwand hit who might of been moved off the position in years prior (think Schwarber). The changes that would actually help contact be made are changes that baseball fans vehemently argue against, so at least for the time being I don’t see this changing.
I don’t think teams will ever value batting average as a performance metric again, given the flaws of the stat that we all know about. But of course we’d all like to see a game with more hits
Let’s see what return Adam Frazier fetches to test that theory.
Amen! Give me a David Fletcher over a Yasmani Grandal any day in terms of watching the game. I feel like some people forget that baseball is actually a game played on a field and not just a bunch of numbers in an excel sheet.
The only people who “forget” this are placed in fields to try to keep the crows away
I don’t want to embrace this. It’s been said a billion times already, but a lineup of Grandals and Adam Dunns would be a incredibly dull watch, worse than even watching the bottom half of the Pirates lineup. Great in theory, and maybe even good for the players’ teams, but a horrible fan experience.
The trend I’d like to see is more pitchers flooding the zone with strikes and eliminating the opportunities for Grandals and Dunns to rely on walks to inflate their wOBAs.
How could you say no to a team of all Adam Dunns? (Unless you’re the team of all Dee Gordons that has to play against them and watch with horror as your reality becomes even more strange by the day.)
Strange indeed lol.
His point is that in terms of how enjoyable the game is to watch a bunch of Adam Dunn’s is really boring. My guess is you don’t even watch the game you just like running regression analyses using the statistics generated.
The amount of unrealistic and absurd scenarios defenders of batting avg need to come up with to attack an extreme position no one wants…amazing
Maybe at the plate, but I would pay good money to watch 9 Yasmani Grandals take the field
Get some hits, get on base, move the runners, manufacture some runs. That is good baseball.
I cannot argue with the fact that in this era of juiced balls, lots of strike outs, and a shortage of actual rallies that the best way to score runs is to sit back and hope that Eugenio Suarez hits a few over the wall. That doesn’t mean that this is the most entertaining product that MLB can put out there for its fandom to see. I prefer the game i grew up with, many more base hits than K’s, when 3 hour games were as rare as a well pitched 9th inning by a Yankee closer recently, when men like Maury Wills, Lou Brock, Vince Coleman, Ricky Henderson, Tim Raines, Marquis Grissom and many more thrilled us with their base stealing prowess, when starting pitchers were allowed to throw a 129 pitch complete game 3-hitter with regularity, not once in a decade. Yes, batting average may not mean what it once did but the game is no where near as entertaining as it once was. I wonder how many of the young people, many on this blog who think those among us who long for the game we remember are dinos, actually saw games that took 2 1/2 hours to play and were filled with hits, steals and hit and runs while still having a good balance of gap shots and HR’s.
Fellow dino here. I don’t care about batting average per se, but I agree that the TTO-driven game is less enjoyable to watch. Baseball needs to tweak the rules to encourage more balls in play – I’d love to see fair territory expanded somehow, at least in the infield area, to do this (and make it more dangerous to over-shift defensively).
How would you increase fair territory in the infield?
Increase the distance between the bases.
I wonder how much the increased game time impacts pitchers who complete the game. I could totally imagine 129 pitches thrown over an hour and half feels really different than 129 pitches thrown over three and half hours. I’d expect the longer time to increase fatigue, but I’m not sure how one could study that effect
I’m afraid as a fan it’s impossible to embrace that kind of slash line. I would much rather watch David Fletcher than 2020 Joey Gallo. Baseball is part of the entertainment industry and watching a batter fail 8 out of ten times isn’t fun. If they have a high OBP I can live with it but the game needs more David Fletcher’s and fewer sub 200 hitters. And that chart from 2020 shows you that only Muncy and Olson were barely league average production. Even if fletcher produces at the same league average as them I would much rather have him on my team for the entertainment value of balls in play.
Do people not realize the difference between a .200 and .300 hitter over the course of a season is like… 1 hit every 9-10 games?
The problem with BA is for generations, it was seen as one of the most important stats in the game, when in reality it’s one of many basic tools that only tells you a fraction of the story. It’s not 100% useless, but certainly not something you should base strong opinions of players on.
I agree.
I would think any numbers person would appreciate all of these statistics for the perspective they share, no matter what. Batting average is still a really interesting statistic.
Batting average is one of the statistics I would use if I wanted to describe to my son how offensive performance is different today as compared to the 1910s. I wouldn’t rely on wOBA even though it’s considered a superior batter value.
If a modern value can take one hitter from the 1920s and one hitter from the 2020s and say they are “equally great offensive players”, while one of them had a .390 BA and the other had a .275BA, That’s pretty cool to me. Without batting average, that historical perspective gets washed away.
To me the headline of this article is all wrong. The headline should speak to batting average’s importance in understanding historical context.
Baseball is a strategy game and part of what I like is that it changes. Not usually because of rule changes (sometimes) but because we figure out better ways to play. Is it fun to watch the same thing be the dominant strategy for decades? I like seeing new ways to play the same game and have success.
I’m generally pro-analytics but this is an example of how they’ve negatively impacted the game. Sure a Yasmani Grandal might be a slightly better hitter than someone with a different profile but the product on the field suffers significantly. Walks and strikeouts are probably the two most boring outcomes in the game and he has them in spades.
If batting average isn’t important how does Tony Gwynn accumulate enough WAR to be in the HOF?
Asking. Not questioning.
Tony Gwynn accumulated a lot of WAR by making a lot of contact, which is one approach to being a valuable hitter – and it leads to a high BA. So for Tony Gwynn, you can evaluate his performance based on batting average because he did the thing that Batting Average measures quite well. The problem is, comparing him to, say, Mark McGwire based on batting average makes it look like Tony Gwynn was a far superior hitter to Big Mac.
Since Mac took a lot of walks and – when he made contact – hit the ball a mile – he was able to produce a very similar amount of career value. If we compared them on the basis of batting average alone, we’d never know that.
It’s no different from comparing them based on HRs. HR simply measure how many times you hit the ball out of the park. Batting Average measures how often a hitter made contact and the ball fell in play. Neither paint an accurate picture of the total value a hitter provided.
So, we can say batting average isn’t “important” (in this context) because there are lots of ways to produce value with a low batting average. Just as there are lots of ways to produce value without hitting home runs.
BA is one way to provide value, but value can be provided without it.
Tony Gwynn had a high BA, but his OBP was typically 50 points higher than his BA and all his best WAR years coincide with his best years for SLG. Overall Gwynn would not be a qualified HOF candidate (note: doesn’t mean writers wouldn’t elect him) if he was living solely off of BA. If he cranked up his OBP and SLG, he could have gotten in with a much lower BA.