Is batting average an utterly obsolete baseball statistic, or do those historic batting averages you committed to memory when you were 10 years old still have pleasurable uses?
“Batting average” was the premier statistic for evaluating hitters from the 1870s, becoming an official National League stat in 1876, until roughly the turn of the millennium.
It was worked out by sportswriters Henry Chadwick (starting from cricket stats) and Herve Dobson as hits divided by at-bats.
All hits, from a single to a four-bagger, were treated as one hit. Walks were not counted as either a hit or an at-bat. Batting average was an easy stat for people to calculate with pencil and paper.
The hitter with the highest batting average in his league each year was declared the Batting Champion.
Rules of thumb emerged:
.200 was bad
.250 was mediocre
.300 was good
.350 was great
.400 was legendary
And American youths memorized many famous batting averages such as Joe Jackson’s .408 in 1911, Rogers Hornsby’s .424 in 1924, and Tony Gwynn’s .394 in 1994.
Over time, however, reasonable criticisms of batting average emerged, especially after the Babe Ruth Revolution around 1920. Ruth introduced slugging homers as a conscious strategy, which suddenly made batting average a less useful measure for comparing players.
Clearly, Ruth’s home runs were more important toward winning baseball games than were Eddie Collins’ singles.
In response to Ruth, in 1923 the National League made “slugging average” an official stat: total bases (with a homer counting for four bases, a triple for three, etc.) were divided by at bats. For some reason, the American League, home to most of the famous sluggers, didn’t officially adopt slugging average until 1946.
Also, because pitchers were afraid to throw the ball down the middle to him, Ruth got on a first base a huge amount via walks and came around to score an enormous number of times. This pointed out that the 19th Century assumption that a walk was more to be thought of as a detriment to the pitcher, like a fielder’s error, than a credit to the hitter was misleading.
Branch Rickey wrote a Life article in 1954 endorsing “on-base percentage” (hits plus walks divided by at-bats plus walks) as better than batting average.
In 1984, Pete Palmer and John Thorn invented the “OPS” statistic of on-base percentage plus slugging average. You just added the two existing stats together. It was easy and it made sense. Standards slowly emerged:
.600 was weak
.700 was routine
.800 was good
.900 was very good
1.000 was great
1.100+ was historic
The criticisms of batting average as a means for comparing players are well-known and persuasive.
For example, Luis Arraez, recently traded to the Philadelphia Phillies, is leading the National League with a .318 batting average, probably heading toward his fourth batting championship. In contrast, Pete Crow-Armstrong of the Chicago Cubs is batting .281, but is the runaway front-runner for the National League most valuable player award because virtually every one of his statistics other than singles-hitting is better than Arraez’s:
PCA Arraez
Batting Average .281 .318|
Homers 41 6
Runs 111 66
Walks 77 29
Total Bases 325 239
OnBase Percent .376 .350
Slugging Avg. .570 .430
OPS .946 .780
You can go on to note that PCA has stolen 36 bases compared to ten for Arraez. And Crow-Amstrong is one of the two or three best defensive outfielders in baseball, while Arraez is mediocre in the field.
All in all, Arraez is an above average major league starting player. But Crow-Armstrong is a few times as valuable as Arraez is this year. For example, the synthetic black box Wins Above Replacement stat in its Baseball Reference incarnation, bWAR, says PCA is worth 9.2 more wins in 2026 than the typical replacement-quality nonentity that the Cubs could have gotten off the waiver wire, while Arraez is worth 3.1 more wins. FanGraphs has Crow-Armstrong at 10.0 fWAR and Arraez at 4.3.
Modern baseball analytics are optimized toward getting hired by baseball front offices to choose future talent, which is a perfectly reasonable career ambition.
So, what’s my defense of the usefulness of having a bunch of old baseball statistics stuck in your long-term memory?
Paywall here.
