How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Enjoy Batting Average Again
It was the Before Times, November 21, 2019 to be exact. While dinosaurs no longer roamed the earth, we had yet to learn about COVID-19. Unencumbered, several FanGraphs staffers descended upon Manhattan for a FanGraphs Live event and an Effectively Wild taping. Yours truly was on the Major League Update panel alongside The Athletic’s Lindsey Adler and Marc Carig. Near the end of our half-hour segment, EW co-host Meg Rowley asked us, “What would you change about baseball?… What would you do at this moment, at this juncture, to make baseball more compelling?”
I don’t even recall the answer I intended to give, but after waiting my turn, I built upon one of Marc’s ideas about his desire to see the ball put in play more often. “Start caring about batting average again,” I said. “Because batting average is fun.”
An actual listen to the podcast suggests otherwise, but in my own recollection, it felt like one of those record-scratch moments where everything stops abruptly and you can hear a pin drop. A FanGraphs writer, one with a lengthy track record of applying sabermetric principles, one who made his name with objectivity-based Hall of Fame analysis — that guy, defending batting average?
My impulse to defend this most basic figure — the one that for so many of us served as a gateway drug to caring about batting stats — had arisen late in the 2019 season while watching debate over the AL MVP award unfold. Coming off a weak year with the Rockies, DJ LeMahieu had signed with the Yankees and put together what stands out as his best full season, hitting .327/.375/.518 while setting career highs in home runs (26), wRC+ (136), and WAR (5.7). LeMahieu ranked ninth in the AL in that last category, significantly behind league leader Alex Bregman (8.3) and MVP winner Mike Trout (7.8, despite missing most of September due to season-ending surgery to alleviate a Morton’s neuroma). But LeMahieu’s one-man hit parade had been one of the season’s biggest and most pleasant surprises. He’d won the hearts of fans in the Bronx, and down the stretch was greeted with chants of “M-V-P!” in his honor.
Somewhere between my own dismissal of the notion that LeMahieu deserved serious MVP consideration and the announcement that he was not a finalist for the award, which was considered a snub in some quarters, I came around. Hence my attempt to articulate my concern to the FanGraphs Live audience, particularly when the concept connected to Marc’s comments about how static the game had become.
“I’m not saying DJ LeMahieu should have [been] MVP, but there’s a reason people care about DJ LeMahieu… [Y]ou’re hitting .330. You’re putting the ball in play… guys are running around on the field, not striking out. There’s fun there,” I explained, working up a head of steam. “Let’s stop talking about caring about batting average as being this scourge… It’s a connection to casual fandom, it’s a connection to the game’s history. It’s something that I think, from the analytics side, we’ve gone too far overboard in working against… Let’s give a shit about batting average again.”
I wiped away beads of flopsweat as I waited for my words to land. “What about wins and losses? No? Still stupid?” asked Marc as the whole room erupted with laughter. “It is FanGraphs, we have to draw the line somewhere,” giggled Meg before directing the audience into a Q&A session.
In retrospect, I can trace some of my restored appreciation for the stat to having worked on The Cooperstown Casebook. Within the book, I’d noted that the Hall of Famers with the lowest JAWS rankings at each position were quite often those with shiny batting averages from the high-offense 1920s and ’30s whose elections had been aided by the cronyism of the Frankie Frisch/Bill Terry Veterans Committees. In writing about those players, my stance had softened from a reflexive urge to throw the bums out (per the book’s cheeky subtitle) to a more understanding explanation of how they’d snuck in. What’s more, I’d taken at least some satisfaction in debunking the way that certain high-average players previously derided as the institution’s most overrated, such as George Sisler, Hughie Jennings, and Joe Kelley, fit more smoothly within a continuum of Hall of Famers in the light of WAR and JAWS.
Statheads who know their history know that batting average has been under attack since before Bill James’ emergence. Baseball Magazine’s F.C. Lane railed against it in 1915 and proposed slugging percentage as a better measure. Branch Rickey, in addition to perfecting the farm system and knocking down the AL/NL color barrier, more or less invented on-base percentage in 1954. From those proto-sabermetricians to James (who introduced Run Created in his Baseball Abstract series in the 1970s and ’80s) and the dynamic duo of Pete Palmer and John Thorn (who in 1984’s The Hidden Game of Baseball gave us OPS and Linear Weights), and onto Baseball Prospectus, Tom Tango, and the writers at FanGraphs, smart people have shown time and again that batting average isn’t the best stat for measuring offense. It doesn’t correlate as well with run scoring as OBP, SLG, or more advanced metrics. Well, so what? For decades now, we’ve incorporated the knowledge of those stats’ importance into our measures of offensive proficiency via OPS+, wOBA, wRC+, and WAR. Without having to crunch those numbers ourselves, we can deploy them when needed, build leaderboards, project performances, estimate contract values, fill out more enlightened Hall of Fame ballots. Huzzah!
Yet I’m convinced that we’ve ignored batting average at our peril. Since time is a flat circle, half a decade after that FanGraphs Live episode, I found myself assuming a similar position after responding to a Bluesky post by Tango himself. Tom has done great things that are important to what we do here at FanGraphs. He co-wrote The Book: Playing The Percentages In Baseball; his name is at the bottom of every page of this site; and at MLB.com he’s helped to bring about a whole new set of tools that are furthering our knowledge. But on this particular day, I bristled at his dismissiveness of the humble stat, and he seemed taken aback by my defense.
“[S]ince it is so overused on the other side as a *primary* level stat, then in order to “balance” things, then the rest of us should *discard* its usage,” wrote Tango in one subsequent post. Then after railing at it being used onscreen in a TNT Statcast broadcast, he added in the next, “This is why you have to stamp it out where we can, because it will still exist elsewhere anyway.”
As a longtime recurring guest on MLB Network, I’m old enough to remember Brian Kenny arguing to “Kill the Win” on MLB Now more than a decade ago, and while I’m not going to offer a full-throated defense of that particular stat, I understand the urge to cringe, not only at the notion that we somehow need to stop counting something that’s been part of baseball for over a century, but that we should do so in the name of “educating” the public. Having spent over 20 years working to encourage the use of my own metric (JAWS) and those of my employers by a wider audience, I’ve learned — the hard way — that the impulse to “educate” does not automatically generate a desire to absorb those lessons, and it especially doesn’t work if you’re attempting to pull the rug out from under the recipient of your message. Seeking to eliminate familiar statistics is counterproductive and condescending, and only makes it more difficult to get across some of the other work that we do.
What’s funny about the attempts to move beyond batting average and the win is that the game itself is doing a bang-up job of marginalizing both statistics already. We’re just past a Hall of Fame election cycle where a good share of the discussion centered around the increasing remoteness of attainable pitching milestones such as 300 or even 200 wins, as starting pitcher workloads have been scaled back dramatically over the past decade. Meanwhile, in 2024, the league-wide batting average was just .243, which is in a virtual tie for the fourth-lowest mark since 1900, ahead of only 1968 (.237), 1908 (.239), and 1967 (.242). That virtual tie is with the 2022 season, the final year before MLB banned infield shifts in the service of promoting offense. Luis Arraez won the 2024 NL batting title — his third straight batting title, mind you — with just a .314 average, the lowest mark for a league leader since 1988 (Tony Gwynn with .313). Arraez had the previous lowest-since-Gwynn mark as well, .316 in 2022.
More on the numbers below. Regarding the Hall of Fame election cycle, an even greater share of the discussion focused upon the possibility that Ichiro Suzuki might be the first position player to be elected unanimously. It’s not because he was a greater player than those who preceded him, from Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth on through Willie Mays and Henry Aaron, but because 21st-century voters have largely abstained from the gatekeeping to which a grumpy faction of past voters clung.
Leaving aside the disappointment caused by one person’s depriving Suzuki of unanimity, I’m almost as puzzled by some observers’ astonishment that it was Suzuki (or before him, Derek Jeter), and not some slugger of recent vintage, that nearly became the first position player to pull off a clean sweep. Despite his comparatively modest 107 OPS+ and .402 SLG, it shouldn’t be hard to grasp the appeal of Suzuki and the other hit machines, from Jeter on back to Rod Carew and (leaving the ickiness of his off-field life aside, which admittedly isn’t easy) Pete Rose, and before them, to Sisler, Cobb, and Willie Keeler.
Batting average is entertainment value, in volume.
It’s imprecise to say the object of the pitcher-batter confrontation is to get a hit. It’s to avoid making an out — hence the statheads’ appreciation for OBP — and for a team to do so enough times in a game that it scores more runs than its opponent. Hits are the most common way of doing this, about three times more common than walks, and they’re vastly more entertaining. Pitch recognition, timing, the sound and sight of contact, the trajectory of the ball, the acceleration and speed of the batter and the baserunners, the converging of fielders toward the ball, the suspense of what might transpire if a play is made… so much is actually happening! Particularly with runners on base, a ball in play lights up the field like a pinball game. It may not be as dramatic as a home run, or as productive, but it’s action, it’s excitement — to my mind the most accessible form of excitement the game has to offer. That brand of excitement is the one most often created by the guys with the high batting averages. Should it be a mystery why people enjoy that, and why they especially wish to celebrate the players who most frequently make that happen?
When I spoke up on behalf of LeMahieu, Major League Baseball was coming off a high-offense season that featured a record 6,776 home runs, thanks in large part to a more aerodynamic baseball. The 30 teams hit a combined .252/.323/.435 while scoring 4.83 runs per game. Half a decade and several rule changes later — including not only the banning of the shift but also the addition of the pitch clock, the disengagement rule, and larger bases — MLB’s overall slashline for 2024 was .243/.312/.399 en route to scoring 4.39 runs per game. Home run levels weren’t that far off from 2018, before the record high, but the league-wide batting average declined nine points from where it was in 2019, a drop representing the loss of 2,216 hits over a 4,858-game season, about 0.9 hits per game between the two teams. The 2024 mark was eight points lower than in 2014, and 19 points lower than in 2009, representing the loss of 3,701 hits, about 1.5 hits per game between the two teams. You might not notice it if you’re taking in only a game a week, but if you’re a regular consumer, you definitely notice. In response to the ever-increasing average pitch velocities that have made contact more difficult than ever, batters have focused upon getting more bang for their buck, adjusting their pitch selection and swing planes to hit the ball in the air in the hope that it clears the fence and offsets the rise in strikeouts. Broadly speaking it has, but that doesn’t mean the game is better for it.
It would be an overstatement to say that baseball is in dire trouble given that the sport set revenue records in 2023 ($11.6 billion) and ’24 ($12.1 billion). But even with back-to-back attendance increases in the past two seasons, attendance is down over 10% relative to its 2007 high-water mark. What’s more, the rise in attendance is about to suffer a setback given that both the A’s and the Rays are temporarily moving to minor league ballparks for 2025. The recent World Series between the Dodgers and Yankees set a post-pandemic high as far as television ratings go, but those ratings were still lower than in any World Series between 1968 and 2019. The sport can’t take its already-marginalized place in the national consciousness for granted, which is why it comes as a relief that the pitch clock has been so successful, trimming an average of 28 minutes from games relative to 2022.
There’s no easy remedy to increase the league-wide batting average; if I had one, I might be the next commissioner, but I don’t. Adjusting the height and distance of the fences, to disincentivize homers while creating more territory for defenders to cover, is an option, albeit an expensive one as it would require modifications in every ballpark, likely including a loss of seating. Widening the field itself — flaring the foul lines outward by a few degrees — is probably too radical for most tastes, particularly in a game that loves its right angles.
Some potential changes, such as the increase of the pitching distance, bear no fruit upon experimentation. Others can unleash unintended consequences. We’ve gotten a glimpse at what happens when the league monkeys with the composition of the ball itself; not only did changes in manufacturing materials and methods lead to balls that were more aerodynamic, but the philosophical change brought by the so-called launch-angle revolution compounded the impact, leading to the aforementioned swell in homers.
One thing that hasn’t been tried is a return to the time-honored mechanism for restoring balance to the game, tweaking the strike zone’s vertical boundaries. It hasn’t been done since 1996, when the lower boundary was changed from the top of the batter’s knees to just below the kneecap. Tightening the zone could goose offense, though some of that would be via walks, not hits, and one has to wonder whether it would exacerbate the already-worrisome trends toward more hard-throwing relievers and the frequency of pitcher injuries. Last week at Baseball Prospectus, Patrick Dubuque suggested shrinking the size of gloves as a means of increasing batting average on balls in play, which feels like it might be the most subtle change — one that costs us some web gems, perhaps, but could add a bit more adventure to defensive play, and a sprinkling of extra hits.
Proposing and picking apart those possible solutions could fill several columns, and we’ve got a long way to go until Opening Day. For now I’m content simply to get this long-simmering rant off my chest. Most of you reading this understand that batting average isn’t the be-all and end-all of offensive stats; if not, the literature toward that end, on this site and others, is voluminous. Knowing that, however, doesn’t require you to adopt the mindset of your friendly neighborhood president of baseball operations and demand that our every discussion of baseball point toward maximizing wins and WAR across a roster. Just let batting average be what it’s always been, an easily accessible if sometimes misleading thread that runs through a century and a half of baseball history, and through most of our fandom.
Brooklyn-based Jay Jaffe is a senior writer for FanGraphs, the author of The Cooperstown Casebook (Thomas Dunne Books, 2017) and the creator of the JAWS (Jaffe WAR Score) metric for Hall of Fame analysis. He founded the Futility Infielder website (2001), was a columnist for Baseball Prospectus (2005-2012) and a contributing writer for Sports Illustrated (2012-2018). He has been a recurring guest on MLB Network and a member of the BBWAA since 2011, and a Hall of Fame voter since 2021. Follow him on BlueSky @jayjaffe.bsky.social.
Amen brother
You know what? I get it. I know batting average does not do a good job of describing offensive production or value, but it does describe a visual component of the game that I like.
I’d push back on the notion that it doesn’t do a good job of describing offensive production.
It’s value was overstated previously, and it can’t compete with the new advanced metrics, which combine all of the relevant inputs (eg. wRC+). However, I think BA is probably the single input that best describes a batter’s value. To be clear, when I say “input”, I mean compared specifically to BB% and ISO. It’s obviously not as powerful as OBP or SLG, but it’s not independent from those statistics. In fact, as an input, it makes up the vast majority of those statistics, and by extension, OPS.
And yet we threw it away for the better part of a generation, as an overcorrection to a bygone era.
If you don’t get hits, it’s very hard to be an elite hitter.
The comparison I think best illustrates this is from 2023. Luis Arraez was in the bottom 20 of both BB% and ISO among qualified hitters. But he hit .354, and that fueled a 130 wRC+. That was 10 points better than Kyle Schwarber, who was in the Top 10 in both BB% and ISO. Now that was an outlier from Arraez, but even over a three year sample, he’s within a few points of Schwarber in terms of wRC+.
I’d push back on the notion that it doesn’t do a good job of describing offensive production.
It’s value was overstated previously, and it can’t compete with the new advanced metrics, which combine all of the relevant inputs (eg. wRC+). However, I think BA is probably the single input that best describes a batter’s value. To be clear, when I say “input”, I mean compared specifically to BB% and ISO. It’s obviously not as powerful as OBP or SLG, but it’s not independent from those statistics. In fact, as an input, it makes up the vast majority of those statistics, and by extension, OPS.
And yet we threw it away for the better part of a generation, as an overcorrection to a bygone era.
If you don’t get hits, it’s very hard to be an elite hitter.
The comparison I think best illustrates this is from 2023. Luis Arraez was in the bottom 20 of both BB% and ISO among qualified hitters. But he hit .354, and that fueled a 130 wRC+. That was 10 points better than Kyle Schwarber, who was in the Top 10 in both BB% and ISO. Now that was an outlier from Arraez, but even over a three year sample, he’s within a few points of Schwarber in terms of wRC+ (128 to 123), and he’s ahead of names like Fernando Tatis Jr., Randy Arozarena, Christian Walker and Trea Turner.
An argument so nice I read it twice
That’s oozytwotimes. He’s gonna go get the papers, get the papers.
I think I can get on baord with this, well said.
Hat tip for the Dr Strangelove reference. “Shoot, a fella’ could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff”
We can not afford doubles in the gap!
My favorite season in Albert Pujols’ career was 2003. But not because it was his career best in fWAR (9.5), or wRC+ (184, tied with 2008).
It’s because he hit .359 that year. Which is f*cking insane!
Batting Average has always been cool.
“Batting average is entertainment value” absolutely nails it. No, it’s not the optimal stat for winning the game, but it is near-optimal for fan enjoyment. This more “solved”-era of sports is far less entertaining than the past. Math guys helped teams get an edge, which is awesome, but it also took away from the soul of the game.
On how to fix it, I am an advocate of further limits on fielder alignment. We can make situational allowances, like for double plays, but if the bases are empty, the alignment zones for each position should be small.
Perhaps, but do you want a bunch of boxes and circles (“allowable fielding zones”) all over the diamond, or an umpire with a sextant figuring all this stuff out?
Actually, an umpire with a captain’s hat, white captain’s jacket, and sextant, yes. I changed my own mind, let’s do that!
“Captain Stubing says Altuve is two paces beyond his fielding quadrant, all runners advance forthwith!” *Foghorn blows*
BA is the mid-range jumper of baseball and boy has the “solved-era” of sports killed that too…
To me, one of the biggest mistakes during the push of analytical information – specifically batting average vs. power and their importance – was the lack of nuance in the subject. Sure, in a vacuum, power is always the best option. Who wouldn’t love a home run every time? But throughout a batting order, power isn’t the best option for all nine hitters.
The shift immediately went to “power power power, forget batting average”, which changed the dynamic of the game completely and how hitters approached it. Focusing on power isn’t the strength of everyone, and it’s extremely hard to do. There are some players who should chase a more batting average-friendly style of hitting to fit their hitting profile.
Maybe this only makes sense to me, but it’s something that bothers me.
I think having different kinds of hitters makes it harder on a pitcher and a defense as well. If everybody is the same, it makes matchups easier.
Never understood why this can’t be a “yes, and…” situation. Yes, give me Wade Boggs. Yes, give me Tony Gwynn. Yes, give me Don Mattingly. And yes, give me Ken Singleton and Ben Zobrist and Evan Longoria. Put the ball in play. Draw walks. Do it all!
Jay, you can’t post screenshots in here! This is the Graphs room!
As a pro wrestling fan, this feels very analogous to a response I give when someone informs me that the product I’m watching is “fake”. Sure, there are flaws to batting average if taken at face value, but embracing the entertainment of batting average and suspending your disbelief of other more exact measurements of value or performance – even if only while watching a game – allows you to bring more enjoyment back to baseball rather than spending too much time being concerned with optimizing production/wins.
No fan is actually suspending their disbelief in winning, though. Everyone says they want more balls in play, but actually wants their team to win the World Series even if they do it by walking.
The thing is, every year there are 29 teams that don’t win the World Series. Some people (like me) just want to watch those teams play baseball, and not get bored doing it.
I’m not a wrestling fan, but the best analogy I heard was that no one cries about Hamlet being fake. Once you realize wrestling is soap opera that is socially acceptable for men, it makes way more sense.
IT’S REAL TO ME, DAMMIT!
I’ve long thought batting average is very useful when used in conjunction with on-base percentage, i.e., the separation between the two is a meaningful indicator of the batter’s approach to the plate. So why discard BA simply in the interest of sabermetric orthodoxy?
Some media outlets were trying to report slash lines as OBP/SLG, which I absolutely hate, and which, thankfully, appears to have been largely abandoned. Slash lines should and will always be BA/OBP/SLG.
Not that I care a lick about changing slash line presentation at this point, but I bet it would be far less grating to the anti-BA’ers if the order was reversed. If the idea is to convey strength and type of hitter at a glance, leading with SLG focuses the most attention on the stat likely to reflect a team’s top hitters. The players with meh SLG but high OBPs provide the next tier of value so that second number relays to fans why a non-power guy belongs in the top half of a lineup. Finally, BA is there to add context/separation among the mass of hitters with middling or worse SLG/OBP. For example, one can see why a Jeff McNeil or Jose Iglesias or Ryan McMahon isn’t a terrible option in the 7th or 8th spot, as opposed to a JP Crawford or Cavan Biggio.
In a vacuum, a descending order of statistical importance is more intuitive, though obviously in our reality that ignores the decades of precedence that have shaped our collective intuition.
While I love stats like wOBA, if I want to know what kind of hitter I’m looking at or what kind of year he had, it’s straight the slash like for me. If it’s .300/.400/.500, we’ve got ourselves one hell of a complete hitter. If it’s .200/.350/.500, we’ve probably got some TTO on our hands! This guy probably has good discipline and can hit it out of the park with the best of them. If it’s .300/.350/.370, that guy’s not waiting around. He’s gonna put it in play. Obviously, this is an oversimplification and we have more advanced ways to tell about plate discipline and contact ability, but my go-to is a check of the slash line.
I’ve been saying this for 20 years. If you aren’t actually the manager of a baseball team, there’s very little you need to know about a hitter that the triple slash doesn’t tell you. I know I’m on the wrong website for this, but: all most fans want to know about a hitter is if he was good or not, and the triple slash will tell you that much.
Damn straight.
The most exciting play in baseball is a liner in the gap.
also that glove idea rules
Two totally different arguments are being run together here in a way that does neither any favors. The “batting average is fun” portion is, to me at least, far more interesting and potentially persuasive than the assorted claims about retaining ties to history and casual fandom (of generations now long past), which I think are distractions, poorly argued, and largely an intra-sportswriting niche debate or professional deformation.
I think we do need to spend more time thinking about what makes baseball fun, and even how to quantify it; but isn’t that an argument for WPA, not batting average?
No, it’s not. JJ is talking about the game losing casual fans, not statheads. Most people have no idea what WPA is.
This objection makes no sense to me. Casual fans are turning on the tv over dinner to see the man hit the ball with the stick, and then turning it off again when dinner is finished. Or they’re going to the park once a year and enjoying a cold one while complaining about the price of a hot dog. None of these activities are affected in the least by sportswriters’ choice of numbers. Further, WPA is self-explanatory. If you say “that hit made the Dodgers 27% more likely to win the game” any casual fan that I know will reply “huh, neat.”
I think maybe people are saying “casual fans” when they actually mean hardcore traditionalist conservatives?
I’m not going to relitigate all the well known problems with batting average.
One underdiscussed problem with batting average is that there is no intuitive explanation for what it represents.
Aaron Judge had .322 BA in 2024.
Naively, one might think that roughly every three times Judge comes to bat, he will have one hit.
Except, that is not true at all. Out of all the plate appearances Judge made, only 25.6% of them ended with Judge getting a hit, a far cry from 32.2% that batting average seems to imply.
I do understand why this is so. Using Hits/Plate Appearance instead of Hits/At Bat would unduly penalize hitters with high BB% even more so than the current version of BA does. However, if we are to accept that the value of batting average no longer lies in providing a good measure of a hitter’s offensive contribution and more in measuring the “excitement factor,” then Hits/PA would be better suited to that task as well as being intuitive.
Most people don’t come to the game with nothing but intuition.
Nobody ever talks about the denominator! It’s always “batting average is great because I like hits,” not “batting average is great because walks don’t count as a hitting accomplishment.”
We all celebrated Ichiro’s admission into the Hall of Fame and bristled at the lone voter who dared not to include him, yet he only exceeded fifty walks in a season twice: 68 in 2002 and 51 in 2008. Regardless of their analytical values, putting the ball in play is far more aesthetically pleasing than a walk, which is why I will always appreciate hitters with a high batting average.
Why isn’t lowering the mound being considered? We’ve done it before, it’s easy, and it shouldn’t have many unintended consequences. Ideally, it would be good if we could just force pitchers to throw less hard, but the isn’t going to happen as long as velocity gets paid.
At least lowering the mound would somewhat stunt the effect of high velocity.
Absolutely. This was done between the 1968 and 1969 seasons and had a big positive impact. I don’t understand why this hasn’t been done again recently.
Boston fan here, I remember the seasons when Nomar was flirting with .400 late in the season. That was a special experience you would look at his box score in the paper and the local TV news would report on it nightly. That was a gateway drug for a whole generation of Sox fans we all got good at drawing out his name excessively long. Noooo-Marr Gar-ci-aparra baby
“Batting average” as an “enjoyment factor” is a ludicrous idea, strapped to imposing a specific aesthetic preference on others as though it is empirical fact.
Stuff like this:
This argument that handwaves at “players with higher batting averages are more beloved” because they’re exciting, is just weird. Ichiro is popular because he’s freakin’ Ichiro. People didn’t flock to Yankee Stadium to watch Babe Ruth because he had a high average. McGwire and Sosa weren’t chasing the singles record, or most hits. Aaron Judge didn’t become an icon just because he cracked .300, man.
Luis Arraez is one of the most famous names in baseball, but he’s not even that good. But it’s less about batting average having some sort of innate entertainment value; he’s different from other dudes playing. Different will always grab attention.
Maybe more people would be interested in baseball if people who love baseball didn’t complain about how much baseball sucks?
That logic of yours isn’t logical. If even the people who love baseball think it sucks because it’s boring, what makes you think those without much invested in the game will find it interesting?
And while fans liked the home run chase, I sat in the stands for enough games to know that waiting around for home runs is a pretty boring way to spend two and a half hours – and the same is true if I’m watching it on TV.
It’s an empirical fact that watching people run around is more entertaining than watching people walk, strike out and hit home runs. Ask around. Or just read the comments from everybody else.
I think there’s something to this objection — exciting baseball isn’t actually as simple as this hit-vs-walk dichotomy is making it out to be. Maybe a clarifying question is: was Barry Bonds exciting because he walked? Not exactly, no. But it’s also not exactly NOT true — he was indeed more exciting to watch than, say, Sammy Sosa specifically because of his batting eye. If I think about Bonds in a pivotal playoff plate appearance ca 2000, I think there was a ton of “will he walk” drama involved that there wouldn’t have been if a more one-dimensional power/average hitter had been at the plate instead.
My standard plea in articles like this that list potential rule tweaks to bring about a higher batting average (without increasing home runs) is to consider shortening the base paths.
The idea being that a significantly shorter (would probably need Statcast data to get a sense of how much shorter) run to first base would force defenders to essentially “play in” so they can make the throw in time. This increase in BABIP would help give more value to a high contact guy that mostly hits grounders or soft line drives. Shorter distances between the other bases would encourage more hustle doubles, triples, and stolen bases. All things typically brought up as batting events we’d like to see more of while having zero effect at all on home runs.
I actually think that’s one of the cleanest solutions I’ve ever heard! I think 90′ is one of those things that should stay, but that would have all the desired outcomes and few of the undesired
Everyone who is going to comment on this article already knows the reasons Batting Average isn’t as useful of a stat as OBP, SLG, wRC+, etc.
So no point rehashing that.
A .300 hitter is a thing that we all know what it is. So is a .280 hitter, a .250 hitter, and The Mendoza Line.
BA is a good entry point into talking with casual fans/kids about baseball.
If I’m trying to figure out how the Braves can squeeze another half win out of the available bats on the market at the deadline I’m not worrying about BA.
When I’m talking to my son about why Luis Arraz is a cool player we are only talking about BA.
I’ve got a friend who doesn’t really follow baseball (when we went to see 42 together, she had no idea what had happened when the pitcher balked with Robinson on first and had to ask me).
When Uecker died she wanted to know if he was really a bad player, and she mentioned he had a 200 lifetime batting average according to the news.
I got to explain about the Mendoza line and that a 200 BA was typically considered the worst batting average you could have and stay in MLB. I doubt she’d have cared about his career WAR.
Jay, you should run for commish soley on “Kick Bud Selig Out of the Hall of Fame”.
I love the idea of a microscopic strike zone. If pitchers are going to be this nasty and nuclear, it’s gotta be right over the middle of the plate. 104mph meatballs.
With a dramatically smaller strike zone there would be an initial adjustment period where walk rates would be unwatchably high but once teams prioritize command pitchers it could be cool. Or the run environment would just make the steroid era look like deadball.
I suspect a dead-er ball would (over time) help with batting averages. It would disincentive swinging for the fences, and result in a shift towards players that make contact. More Luis Arraez’s, fewer Joey Gallo’s – you would still have your Trout’s and Judge’s and Soto’s, regardless of their approach.
Pitchers could pitch more aggressively, not as worried about giving up so many home runs, which leads to more pitches in the strike zone, which leads to more aggressive approaches at the plate. More pitches in the zone and more aggressive batters leads to more entertainment – more balls in play, showcasing more defense athleticism and speed on the basepaths.
I like the idea of just softening the ball. Improves safety as well.
One angle in favor of batting average – it is something you see, that you can quantify, in real time. You can see a batting average drop over the course of am 0-4 game. You can see pitchers ERA’s go up after giving up four runs across the first three innings. You can kind of do the math, or approximate it, in real time without a calculator. Pitching wins, saves – those are things you the fan, you the viewer, can tally up and get your head around in real time.
I love OPS, and WHIP, and K% and BB% and WAR and WPA. They make so much sense from an analytical level – constructing a team and comparing players across eras (or even just ballparks).
BUT. Let’s use relief pitching as an example. I LOVE that we have RE24, the run expectancy matrix. I think saves are barf-inducingly stupid – but the concept of saves, how to count them, that makes sense. A few years ago Nate Silver invented a Goose Eggs stat – it is real simple, along the lines of counting up how many times a reliever enters the game and finishes the inning having allowed zero runs to score (inherited or otherwise). THAT is a stat that makes so much more sense than a save, and you can do the mental calculus in real time – during a game and over the course of a season.
Wins Above Replacement – if my favorite player is a first baseman that goes 1-4 with a single, I am guessing their WAR went down that day. If they are a centerfielder who made a couple nice catches, maybe their WAR stayed the same – but because WAR is so incremental and inscrutable it doesn’t do anything for me as a viewer of the game. It adds value as a fan who reads articles and argues about who was better, but it is disconnected from real fan experience.
This was not a fully baked thought, do with it what you will 🙂
I agree with this 100%, but even more so for fielding stats. If a shortstop makes a diving stop behind the bag but throws a little late to get the runner at first – how does that affect his DRS? His OAA? Intuitively, maybe those would go down (no out recorded, after all) but maybe it’s just a wash?
That’s much different than “batter hits a double” or even “batter reaches base on a fielder’s choice” – I know how that impacts his batting stats in a way that is intuitive and seems to correlate with whether my team is in a better or worse position to win.
The tone of this column of this is so self-serving and condescending. Don’t hurt your arm patting yourself on the back. This could be the #1 submission for why so many casual fans are turned off by the serious Sabermetrics crowd. You decided to ignore and denigrate batting average and now the rest of us should be so impressed that you’ve gained some perspective? Please stop being so smug.
whoosh
An argument can be made that the original object of the batter in the batter-pitcher confrontation was, in fact, to make a hit and for the pitcher to make get the ball in play so fielders to display their skill. The ball and walk emerged to force pitchers to throw hit-able pitches. The discovery of the importance of OBP is an unintended consequence to pitchers’ unsportsmanlike/ungentlemanly behavior.
Give us the slash line, and people can look at whatever part of it they want.
It’s been said in different words but what it boils down to, to me is this:
Batting average makes up 77.8% of on-base percentage and 60.9% of slugging average. It would be kind of insane to just discount it completely.
On the subject of traditional stats, it’s always ticked me off how arbitrary a lot of them are. Like a SP only can get a win by finishing 5 IP but a reliever can enter the 2nd inning in line for a win. OR no RBI on a GIDP. Or no steals for defensive indifference. Stuff like that that’s obviously trying to very inadequately make the stats more nuanced to more accurately assess player value. It’s sort of hilarious how people talk about these stats describing what happens on the field vs WAR and stuff being made up when even their inventors apparently realized how deficient they were without adjustments.
Anyway, the point is that I wish the official stats bureau would ditch some of these qualifiers and stuff and just treat them more straightforwardly. Have the winning pitcher be the pitcher who’s in the game when their team takes the lead for good, etc. Not sure how realistic this is because I guess they’d have to revise a lot of older records to bring stuff up to date but it’s something I’ve always noticed.
New stat proposal – “modern wins and losses” (mW-mL).
It is not an advanced stat, it just counts wins and losses differently. If you pitch two inning of your team’s win, you get 0.2 mW (2/9ths of a win).
It doesn’t care if you gave up six or zero runs, it only reflects that you were a part of a win or loss.
It obviously favors good teams (just like the historical pitcher W-L statistic).
But it fixes the all-or-nothingness of the W-L stat, while being both intuitive and incredibly easy to figure. And it rewards players for winning games.
How about a different stat that counts .2 of a contribution to a team’s winningness?
We could call it, I don’t know, win shares?
I feel that batting average, while pairing with high contact/low K rate, can contextually be a factor that decides games, and especially more in the postseason. In general, I would take the .300/.330/.470 hitter over the .210/.330/.470 hitter, assuming the same OPS
You then factor speed in the lineup. While I don’t know the most advanced studies on this subject, I think a team will capitalize on speed more with the higher batting average profile than the ISO HR profile. You then add the new SB rule which promotes plus baserunning even more than before.
I think it’s more of a sound strategy to have more contact hitters when paired with better baserunning in front of it. More action and more hits mean more baserunning situations. When you then start factoring park factors, some ballparks yield more singles and doubles vs homers which in turn yields more baserunning situations and more or less HR’s.
Baserunning would be more important in front of a Tony Gwynn profile instead of Adam Dunn, assuming they both had exact on-base and slugging. I couldn’t tell you the exact amounts of added offense but I feel it could produce more runs when the lineup is efficient with respect to baserunning and contact.
When it comes to the postseason, The “Gwynn” profile vs the “Dunn” profile has a higher floor but lower ceiling than Dunn. Having 9 Dunn offensive profiles vs Gwynn have a higher variance of destroying the opponent, but also a higher chance of running cold due to the low sample size of ABs in the postseason that’s needed to “normalize” the amount of HR needed from ISO power hitters. Maybe a blend of these profiles is best? I’m curious how advanced metrics sees this, and what can be learned going forward.
So yes… we know batting average is flawed… but it generally gives you a snapshot of what type of hitting profile you have, while paired with OPS.
And yes, batting average is entertaining!
In your example the.300 hitter is more valuable. A hit pretty much always moves the base runner at least one base maybe more. A walk doesn’t. Runner on 3rd base, two outs, a hit is much more valuable than a walk but they both have same OBP.
All I know is that whenever I’m at a game and a near Mendoza Line guys comes up to bat, I figure it’s probably a good time as any to go get a beer.
Which means you get plenty of opportunities to go get a beer.
“LeMahieu’s one-man hit parade”
I see what you did there, and I love it. Easily a Top 40 joke in the history of the site.
The quoted bits from those old Tango pieces were new to me, and very weird. “People should calibrate their opinion or use of [thing], in order to somehow balance or cancel out other people’s opinion or use of [thing]”? That’s just a very strange reason to alter one’s opinion or use of anything.
In addition to just being strange, it also presumes a debatable theory of social change. It seems like a recipe for generating backlash and negative polarization among people with different opinions than yours.
Batting average is often misunderstood. It is simply a measure of success in what players aim to achieve, making it one of the purest forms of measurement. Here lies the issue with weighted stats like wRC+ it is that it dissects the game into individual occurences rather than assessing the game though connective lens.
I’ll give you two examples.
If I offered you one homer or three walks in an inning of course everyone would take the one homer, but if I doubled the offer to two homers or six walks now you would take the six walks although weighted stats would still value the homers over the walks.
Here is another example. Comparative 2022 season Gerit Cole and Adam Wainwright.
Cole gave up 33 homers vs Adam’s 16. Cole 31 doubles to Adam’s 35. Walks Cole 50 vs Adam’s 54 Cole pitched 200.2 inning vs Adam’s 191.2
Yet Adam game up 79 ER to Cole’s 78 though pitching 10 fewer innings, How can this be, homers are regarded the be all end all of baseball, how could Cole keep his ER total lower in face of this homer onslaught. What was the difference between the two pitchers BA. Teams hit 209 against Cole vs .261 against Wainwright, singles.
The trouble with enamoring oneself on extrabase hits is that no team hits enough of them, to score enough runs without supplementation. If you took the highest wRC+ hitters in the game and put them on one team, it would amount to only 2.25 homers and 2 doubles per game, being extremely generous in the math and allowing for half the time a two extra base hits occuring in the same inning during a nine inning game that is still only 3 runs per game, a half run less than the worst offensive 2024 team.
You need to get guys on base and BA is part of that process. It’s not that I am enamored with singles, they simply are the most prolific hit in the game occuring at a rate of 5 to 1 to all other hits and so have immense value by sheer volume.
Mike Gimbel needs to be brought back from exile. He understood the game.
That there is a connectivity to everything that happens in the game thus giving value to each.
One single by itself doesn’t carry much weight but it increase the value of subsequent hits. A single before a homer gives that homer twice the value.
my two cents.
Since I first found Fangraphs nothing has struck me more than the extreme disdain that many of the true believers in statistical analysis have for the traditional metrics. It goes beyond disdain in some and, as Tangotiger’s comments clearly show, reaches a level of loathing. I may be 83 but I am not, in any way, opposed to the use and value of this information but I will defend the game I grew up with because it simply had more action and less dead time. In 1954 47 qualified hitters, on just 16 teams, had a batting average above .280. What did that mean? It meant that the ball was in play. In 2024, with 30 teams, there were only 26 qualifiers with a batting average above .280. That is les than one per team. Batting average may not be a great judge of any one player’s value but it is, most definitely a measure of the action on the field.
I don’t think batting average is a good stat for player evaluation but I agree with the point there’s a gap between optimal strategy and what’s most enjoyable. Of course fans like winning more than anything else and winning is what teams will pursue but in any given game, it’s obvious that more balls in play is more entertaining (outside of the tension of a extremely dominant pitching performance) than fewer balls in play. Long term it definitely is in MLB’s interest to figure out rules that align winning with fan entertainment as Jay says.
It’s happening in basketball, also, as teams focus mostly on shooting 3s. It’s the optimal play, but also the most boring.
Reduce glove size? Go back to 1860s rules and eliminate gloves!
GAA rounders for the win!
And bring back plugging, as well!
Bit of a tangent but the decision to scale wOBA to OBP rather than AVG has always kind of mystified me. The benchmarks for batting average are iconic! Everyone knows what a .300 hitter is
The actual stat contains the same information however you scale it, so why not scale it to the thing that resonates with normies?
Move the mound and fences back. Give them a better chance to hit the ball, put more athletic players in the OF and give those players a chance to hit enough to be an exciting part of the game.
I kind of wish FG had The Athletic’s smiley face rating system, so I could give every article a giant smiley face. Great article Jay!
We are in a populist era and advanced stats are elitist. ¡Viva el batting average!
I became a fan of the game 54 years ago because of the guys who could hit. To this day, one of my favorite things about the game is watching a high BA guy at the plate. The anticipation that something is gonna happen is something that can’t be explained by the metrics. It doesn’t have to be explained. It’s enough that it is so enjoyable to take in.