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.

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