MLB Stats: Everything Wrong With Batting Average

For decades, Batting Average (AVG) has been hailed as the king of the MLB stats for sportswriters and fans alike. Why that should stop, now!

When announcers and analysts speak of a player – any player – many will refer to one of the most antiquated of MLB stats as an indicator of his performance. Visit MLB, Sports Illustrated, or any of the most visited baseball sites that feature player MLB stats, and hitters will more than likely be sorted by their AVG.

Created in 1887 to measure the success of a hitter, we have to ask ourselves one question: does AVG really tell me how successful a hitter actually is?

Imagine you’re sitting on a couch watching a game. Player X comes up to bat. You have no idea who he is, all you know is that he has a .250 AVG. Nothing else.

How would you evaluate Player X?

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In 2018, the league average in batting average is .248. Yes, you read that correctly, .248. That makes Player X an above average hitter in MLB by many people’s standards.

Ask anybody to answer the same question posed before – do you consider a player who’s hitting .250 to be a successful hitter? – and you’ll be flooded with follow-ups.

How many home runs does he have?

Is he a Catcher?

Is he an everyday player?

That’s the problem with batting average. All it tells you is how often a player gets a hit over the number of official at bats. It ignores how often a player walks and, as friend of my podcast Dr. Jim Albert stated in his paper A Batting Average: Does it Assume Ability or Luck, “(it) implicitly assumes that every base hit has the same value.”

Let’s play a quick game.

Below is a table of five anonymous players. If these were actual MLB stats for a given year, which of the five hitters is the MVP?

Player S: 738 PA | 316 TB | 127 R | .350 AVG | .838 OPS
Player G: 671 PA | 343 TB | 109 R | .342 AVG | 1.137 OPS
Player A: 732 PA | 393 TB | 133 R | .318 AVG | 1.021 OPS
Player T: 644 PA | 328 TB | 101 R | .291 AVG | 1.040 OPS
Player M: 620 PA | 322 TB | 93 R | .306 AVG | 1.014 OPS

Now, we can all agree that the object of the game of baseball is to score runs. In order to score runs, teams need runners on base. The closer to home a hitter gets, the greater the chance that he will score a run.

In short, RUNS = WINS.

By this logic, more often than not, the player with the most Total Bases (TB), a stat that assigns a value to hits (singles = 1, doubles = 2, triples = 3, and homers = 4), should score more runs. You can also safely assume that the player with the highest On-Base + Slugging Percentage (OPS), a stat that combines the total amount of times a player reaches a base with their power, can also closely determine who scores more runs.

The table above shows five players that received votes for MVP in 2001. The winner, as you might have guessed by now, was Player S, who just so happens to be Ichiro Suzuki.

Is that who you think deserved the award?

We see by just comparing these five hitters that batting average tells us very little.

Sure, Ichiro has the highest batting average, he also has the least number of TB. Conversely, Player A or Alex Rodriguez leads the group in TB and – will you look at that – he also scored the most runs. By the way, A-Rod scored 6 more runs and had 77 more TB than Ichiro in six fewer at bats. More opportunities for runs to be scored.

Doesn’t that say something about the way we value the pariah of MLB stats (aka batting average)?

This isn’t the first time in history that an award such as MVP has been decided by AVG. It won’t be the last time either, but I hope that moving forward, if you’re a fan of baseball, you start the process of removing it from your life.

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