Is Nobody Hitting for Average, or Is Every Hitter Average Now?

The .300 hitter is dying, Ian Crouch wrote in The New Yorker in 2014. And Bradford Doolittle on ESPN.com in 2019. And Barry Svrluga in the Washington Post just last month. If the .300 hitter is dying, it’s dying the same way you and I are, a little bit each day. Maybe the .300 hitter is just sick.

Why do these stories keep getting written? Well, last week I was checking in on Luis Arraez (come on, dude, I thought you were going to make a serious run at .400!) and came to the startling realization that only nine qualified hitters are on pace to hit .300. Nine! I can’t imagine being a baseball writer, seeing that fact, and not being freaked out enough to write about it.

Baseball is a sport that got its tentacles into the American popular vernacular something like 100 years ago, dropping idioms like eggs. “Three strikes,” “home run,” “lost his fastball,” and dozens of others. “Batting 1.000” is probably a more popular phrase than “batting .300” or “hitting .300,” but the latter is still legible to people who think Christian Walker is what you call pilgrims on the Camino de Santiago.

What was once an attainable standard is now an outlier performance, even compared to 2014 and 2019, when there were 17 and 19 .300 hitters, respectively. Even roping in the other two triple slash categories, it’s undeniable that we’re in a drought:

The 2014 New Yorker article came out on that second-most-recent downslope on that graph. See, at that time, .300 hitters weren’t much rarer than they had been for most of the expansion era, but compared to the 1990s and early 2000s, they were practically an endangered species. And what would cause that era to be a historical anomaly in terms of offense? Everyone say it together: expansion and PEDs. Yes, that’s right, very good, class.

That chart shows the trends you’d expect from what we know about evolutions in league-wide offense. See that huge jump in the number of hitters who slugged .500 in 2019? I don’t think you can actually draw “juiced baseball” on a line graph, but this isn’t much less obvious.

In fact, using the percentage of qualified hitters over a certain threshold, these variations are even more obvious than they would be using league average stats alone:

But when we’re looking for .300/.400/.500 hitters, the league average stats can be instructive. I don’t know if saying it’s “easier” or “harder” to hit .300 in a certain year is the right way to put it. Certainly a .300 hitter has to be better, relative to average, when the league-wide batting average is .245 than when it’s .265.

And there’s no denying that we’re in a historic batting average trough. The league-wide average, .249 as of this writing, has been below .250 five times in the past six seasons. Before that, the last time it was under .250 was 1972, or the year before the American League introduced the designated hitter. In 1999, when the league-wide batting average was .271, more than a third of qualified batters hit .300; this year, it’s down to 6.4%.

Slugging percentage can be even more volatile — from 1988 to 1992, the league-wide average SLG was never higher than .385. In 1994 (say it again, expansion and PEDs), the league slugged .424. The league didn’t slug under .415 again until 2010.

Some of these historical run environment fluctuations are big enough that you’d notice them on a day-to-day, or even plate appearance-to-plate appearance level. Other times — and this is what happened to me — you just go about your business not suspecting anything, and then all of a sudden only nine guys are hitting .300.

I suspect that this can fly under the radar because if you watch baseball you understand what’s average, what’s a little better than average, what’s a little worse, and so on. This is the basis for all those percentile rankings on Baseball Savant, stats like wRC+, or even the 20-80 scouting scale. Knowing a number in isolation is less useful than knowing how it compares to the rest of the league.

Just counting the .300 hitters every year is a fun bit of trivia, and I think there’s a pretty good argument that the idiomatic value of the number outweighs any need to adjust that standard for context. We have other ways of quantifying player performance for serious inquiry, and those standards change over time. One imagines trying to describe a 6-WAR player to Ted Williams, who grunts and says, “I fought in two, and that’s more than enough.”

But it’s nice to know whether the current dearth of .300 hitters is merely an artifact of our current (unusual and rapidly evolving) offensive context. So instead of tracking .300/.400/.500 hitters, I went to the FanGraphs + Stat leaderboards for average, OBP, and slugging percentage, and found how many players per year posted a 115 in those categories.

Why 115? Well, if you want to consider .260 a normal historical baseline for league batting average, .300 is 15% better. It’s also not too far from one standard deviation above average. Most of all, I needed to set a cutoff somewhere, and 115 is appealing from the perspective of we all learned to count by fives because that’s how many fingers most people have on each hand. No need to overthink things:

For most of the expansion era, between 10% and 20% of qualified hitters hit .300 or OBP’d .400, and those two stats tracked each other over time. There are some obvious outliers — again, you can see shortened seasons in 1981 and 2020, the juiced ball, and the point in time where MLB cracked down on steroids.

But even though offense is up in general this year, the number of outliers in the triple slash categories is down. Way down, in fact.

I have no idea why this is. Well, I have a pretty solid theory as to why there’d be fewer outlier hitters in 2023 than in 1999 or whenever: The quality of play improves every year. The more scientific teams and players are about tactics and training, the higher the floor is for a big league hitter. And even if the ceiling is higher in relative terms, there’d be less room between competence and excellence. I think back to a time when Honus Wagner was running circles around everyone else because he was the only player in the league who’d discovered a miraculous breakthrough called “going to the gym.” Once everyone started working out, the Honus Wagners of the world were a little less special. Repeat that process enough times, and you’ll get modern baseball.

As persuasive as I think that idea is, I have no real explanation for why that would’ve happened all at once, since last season. Perhaps all the scientific and training breakthroughs of the late 2010s have been taking root all along, but this is just the first normal major league season in the best part of a decade. Between the sign-stealing scandals, the pandemic, the juiced balls, and the lockout, baseball has had a pretty weird time of it the past few years. Maybe we’re just now getting back to regularly scheduled programming.

Or maybe it’s something else, but that’s a question for another article, perhaps a few years down the road. Either way, the important thing to remember is this: The .300 hitter is still dying.