What about the inspirational value of a hit to the rest of the team? I believe there’s something there. If my teammates get hits, I’m motivated to follow suit. There’s gotta be a way for the analytic-o’s to put a number on that. Either way, I’ll take inspiration over numbers as the winning formula any day.
To paraphrase Bill James, folks like Tom Tango can get so lost in the analytical details that they miss the big picture - a classic trap. Of course batting average matters, much as earnings matter when evaluating a corporation. If we looked only at profit (the equivalent of OPS?) while ignoring revenue (batting average?), we would have an incomplete understanding of the company. Obviously, two hitters with the same batting average aren't necessarily the same, just as two companies with the same revenue aren't necessarily the same. But revenue tells us something fundamental: the company's ability to bring in actual money. It doesn't tell us about profit (OPS), expense management (dWAR), or growth (barrels). It simply measures the company's ability to generate revenue. Batting average serves a similar purpose. It is a direct measure of a hitter's ability to successfully hit the baseball at a high rate. Other statistics tell us important things about what a hitter does with those hits, but that doesn't make batting average itself unimportant.
Call me crazy but I look at batting average like this.
You can't count on a pitcher to walk you. Some pitchers have very high K to BB ratios and they're just not going to walk you. So, sometimes, you need to get a hit.
Tie game, bottom 9, man on 2nd or 3rd, I'll take the high BA guy over the low BA/high OBP guy. Your walk ain't helping us, son. Neither is your strikeout as you swing for the fences. We don't need any of your three outcomes. We just need a single. Put the ball in play.
Tie game, bottom 9, bases loaded ... Ted Williams? Barry Bonds? Shohei Ohtani? Babe Ruth? Willie Mays? Josh Gibson? Ty Cobb? Nah. Give me Eddie Gaedel! And if he isn't available, I want Sylvester Coddmeyer III. https://medium.com/joeblogs/the-kid-who-only-hit-homers-6f9661876035
Yeah, there are limited circumstances where a high BA with low OPS is more important than a high OPS with low BA. But the existence of those circumstances is in the vast minority of opportunities.
To my wife's consternation, while I might not remember important dates in our own lives or the names of in-laws, I can immediately recall the batting average of Tito Francona - the father of Terry - of the 1959 Cleveland Indians: .363. He would have won the batting title instead of Harvey Kuenn (for whom the Indians traded Rocky Colavito in the worst trade ever) if he had enough at-bats.
And how about John Lowenstein, who hit .242 in 1974, and again in 1975? He slumped to .205 in 1976 - BUT BOUNCED BACK TO HIS NORMAL SELF in 1976, when he again hit .242.
I'm not old enough to remember Tito. But I do remember when Terry got off to a really hot start in '84 and was batting .400 a quarter of the way into the season. I was young enough to think he had a shot at bettering Brett and Carew to be the next .400 hitter. Alas he came back to his normal self batting about .260 for two dozen games, then got hurt, also part of his normal self.
...
Lowenstein's teammate Steady Eddie Murray pretty much met that Low standard but at a higher level. He hit .306, .306, collapsed all the way down to .297, then back to .305.
Completely off topic, but I do wonder how many of Joe's longtime readers saw Drake Maye's horrid interception that de facto ended last night's Pats v Seahawks game and immediately thought of Brian Sipe and Red Right 88?
At some point it comes down to AAR, Aesthetics Above Replacement. I love guys with a high OBP, thanks in large part to walks, but I can't anticipate a batter getting a walk in a key situation, well, maybe except for prime juiced Barry Bonds, who no pitcher wanted to face. When a .300 steps to the plate, I can anticipate that batter getting a hit. Being a baseball fan is so rooted in anticipating what is going to happen next.
Agree on the decline of batting average being a sad development. But would be hard to put that genie back in the bottle. Chicks (and MLB GM’s) dig the long ball! But would be great to see another Boggs or Gwynn come along!
The fun thing is that you can nitpick just about any stat, ans they don't really gain or lose importance, it is how the people in charge at that time visualize them that changes.
In early days no on considered OBP, but it didn't make it any less important in run scoring. They may have placed too much on batting average in the old days, and now place too little. The real answer is somewhere between what they do now and the era when it was the end all be all.
Then you can pick apart the way any individual stat is done. There are people on this thread saying things like reached on error should be counted in OBP and sac hits and sac flies should be treated the same and not count as a PA. (I highly disagree with this, as a sac bunt is an order for you to sacrifice yourself, and a sac fly is mostly just guys trying to get hits that their out is deep enough. They want it to be a deep hit.) But it is a valid nitpick.
There are plethora of people, including Joe's Mom, that have trouble with errors and how they figure into stats. There are people worrying about ERA on this thread with an extreme situation to back it up, but there are things that happen. I have seen a starter, not a good pitcher, but with an ERA too high for what he gave up, and a little research led me to the fact that every single time he left the mound in an inning, the reliever allowed all the inherited runs to score. (The only time I have ever seen this.) There are people that want reached on error to count as a time on base (but many less that want it counted as a hit, which is strange.)
My favorite is the strikeout, which was once given too much importance on the offensive side, and now they ignore them completely. While it was always given some importance from the pitcher's side, it is now the be all end all. The result is that an occurrence that has the same positive and negative affect for each side of the ball is so ridiculously far apart in how it is viewed. On the pitching side it is the most important thing out there. On the batter's side thre is no two strike approach and is viewed like any other out. If you can't tell that at least one side (perhaps both) is wrong and that it has the same affect on both sides, I can't help you. But Baseball is filled with and taught by almost exclusively men who do not.
The other fun part is the reliance on OPS. Taking two things with different denominators to make an easy stat using a child's math. Does it give a basic thing in that higher (at least a lot higher) is generally better? Sure. Is it accurate in determining which of two guys that are close but get there different ways? Not at all.
It is just easy. You can put it on scorecard like the KBO. You can use it on the TV graphic which they do here. It is established and people understand and it is not misleading in at least a broad sense, so it is here to stay.
Also, like average, pitcher wins, which have always been one of the easiest stats to nitpick, were for many years the same basis of the Cy Young award, much of the Hall, and now they are pretty much not considered at all. The answer again is somewhere in the middle.
Us older fans were indoctrinated with average and Wins. They were given too much importance then and are ignored now. Some of us realized they were given too much credit long ago. Some of us realize they are a bit too ignored now. Some people just want everything the same so they feel uncomfortable and yell at clouds.
I guess I sorta miss the 300/400/500 slash line to distinguish elite hitters, but since Joseph Daniel Votto dipped below 300 late in his career ( while maintaining a 400+ obp) I haven't cared too much...
Unless I've missed someone, the last players to retire over that are Chipper Jones (2012) and Todd Helton (2013). Before the Selig Era, I think you need to go back to players who started their careers before integration (Teddy Ballgame, Stan the Man) to find any as all time greats like Mantle, Mays, Aaron, and the other stars from the 50s through the 80s came up short.
I suppose seeing that slash lines in an individual season still says something. I still believe Manny B Manny and Edgar to be inner circle hitters from the right side and Pujols has a bunch of those seasons before he turned 30.
Mostly I think it shows how little the 300 part of that slash matters.
I used to call 300/400/500 an "MVP type season." Not all won the award (e.g. Wade Boggs in 1987: 363 / 461 / 588 ... barely cracked the top 10 in voting) but they were all great hitting seasons.
Then came the Selig years with inflated balls (and players) and guys like Brian Giles - very good, but far from great hitters - would routinely meet that level.
There is an appeal to statistics that are simple and easy to understand. Sure, batting average is flawed. But so are weighted statistics like WAR.
But I can explain BA and OBP and ERA and RBI to the uninitiated in two minutes or less. I can watch a single play on a game and quickly grasp how it will affect those stats.
Has anyone watched a WAR “occur” on the field? Can 99% of the people who spout WAR all the time explain it or calculate with given a week and a calculator?
They should move the mound back six inches. Hits ARE more fun to watch than walks. Two free throws counts the same as a eurostep reverse layup but nobody pays to watch free throws.
The avalanche of strike outs is certainly partly because power matters most mathematically but they're also exploding because everyone throws 100. The last time there was so little offensive action they lowered the mound. Move it back 6 inches.
Reggie Jackson badly wanted to hit .300 at least once. He had a chance in 1980. He hits a triple in his first AB in the final game, improving his average to .299610, then is intentionally removed. He knows he's close enough. They round up. It says .300 on every baseball card and reference page.
It bothered Mickey Mantle that a poor final season kicked his career batting average under .300.
I remember Buck Showalter's question when people would tell him about the latest advanced stat for offense.
"What's .300?"
His point is that even the most casual of baseball fans know what a .300 hitter is and what a .300 average means. It's part of the lingo even as we've learned about the many better stats to measure offensive performance.
I'm exactly the same way. What's the .300 equivalent in OBS, SLG, WRC+, etc. et. etc. Otherwise, I can't really tell if someone is good, bad, indifferent. (OK, all the "+" stats are centered on 100, so I guess it's easy to tell who's average. But what counts as elite, that's the question.)
Batting average isn't silly. What's silly is constantly thinking we've discovered something that our ancestors were too stupid to comprehend.
They understood perfectly well that a game where players hit the ball more often and with better precision is a more entertaining game than one where you constantly see the bases loaded with 0 outs leading to no runs. That watching an elite player like Tony Gwynn means being able to expect your favorite player to get a base hit almost every game, and multiple hits in most of those, and that that was something worth tuning in every day for.
They may not have been able to articulate why batting average was the most important stat, but they knew it intuitively. We ignored that wisdom and called it silly, and now we have a game that kind of sucks to watch. I think at some point it's appropriate to admit we were wrong. Optimizing for every win does not make the game better.
What about the inspirational value of a hit to the rest of the team? I believe there’s something there. If my teammates get hits, I’m motivated to follow suit. There’s gotta be a way for the analytic-o’s to put a number on that. Either way, I’ll take inspiration over numbers as the winning formula any day.
Come on Eileen might be my most memorable (and exhausting) wedding reception dance experience ever.
To paraphrase Bill James, folks like Tom Tango can get so lost in the analytical details that they miss the big picture - a classic trap. Of course batting average matters, much as earnings matter when evaluating a corporation. If we looked only at profit (the equivalent of OPS?) while ignoring revenue (batting average?), we would have an incomplete understanding of the company. Obviously, two hitters with the same batting average aren't necessarily the same, just as two companies with the same revenue aren't necessarily the same. But revenue tells us something fundamental: the company's ability to bring in actual money. It doesn't tell us about profit (OPS), expense management (dWAR), or growth (barrels). It simply measures the company's ability to generate revenue. Batting average serves a similar purpose. It is a direct measure of a hitter's ability to successfully hit the baseball at a high rate. Other statistics tell us important things about what a hitter does with those hits, but that doesn't make batting average itself unimportant.
Call me crazy but I look at batting average like this.
You can't count on a pitcher to walk you. Some pitchers have very high K to BB ratios and they're just not going to walk you. So, sometimes, you need to get a hit.
That ought to be valued.
I value it.
As well we should.
Tie game, bottom 9, man on 2nd or 3rd, I'll take the high BA guy over the low BA/high OBP guy. Your walk ain't helping us, son. Neither is your strikeout as you swing for the fences. We don't need any of your three outcomes. We just need a single. Put the ball in play.
Tie game, bottom 9, bases loaded ... Ted Williams? Barry Bonds? Shohei Ohtani? Babe Ruth? Willie Mays? Josh Gibson? Ty Cobb? Nah. Give me Eddie Gaedel! And if he isn't available, I want Sylvester Coddmeyer III. https://medium.com/joeblogs/the-kid-who-only-hit-homers-6f9661876035
Yeah, there are limited circumstances where a high BA with low OPS is more important than a high OPS with low BA. But the existence of those circumstances is in the vast minority of opportunities.
To my wife's consternation, while I might not remember important dates in our own lives or the names of in-laws, I can immediately recall the batting average of Tito Francona - the father of Terry - of the 1959 Cleveland Indians: .363. He would have won the batting title instead of Harvey Kuenn (for whom the Indians traded Rocky Colavito in the worst trade ever) if he had enough at-bats.
And how about John Lowenstein, who hit .242 in 1974, and again in 1975? He slumped to .205 in 1976 - BUT BOUNCED BACK TO HIS NORMAL SELF in 1976, when he again hit .242.
I'm not old enough to remember Tito. But I do remember when Terry got off to a really hot start in '84 and was batting .400 a quarter of the way into the season. I was young enough to think he had a shot at bettering Brett and Carew to be the next .400 hitter. Alas he came back to his normal self batting about .260 for two dozen games, then got hurt, also part of his normal self.
...
Lowenstein's teammate Steady Eddie Murray pretty much met that Low standard but at a higher level. He hit .306, .306, collapsed all the way down to .297, then back to .305.
Completely off topic, but I do wonder how many of Joe's longtime readers saw Drake Maye's horrid interception that de facto ended last night's Pats v Seahawks game and immediately thought of Brian Sipe and Red Right 88?
At some point it comes down to AAR, Aesthetics Above Replacement. I love guys with a high OBP, thanks in large part to walks, but I can't anticipate a batter getting a walk in a key situation, well, maybe except for prime juiced Barry Bonds, who no pitcher wanted to face. When a .300 steps to the plate, I can anticipate that batter getting a hit. Being a baseball fan is so rooted in anticipating what is going to happen next.
Agree on the decline of batting average being a sad development. But would be hard to put that genie back in the bottle. Chicks (and MLB GM’s) dig the long ball! But would be great to see another Boggs or Gwynn come along!
The fun thing is that you can nitpick just about any stat, ans they don't really gain or lose importance, it is how the people in charge at that time visualize them that changes.
In early days no on considered OBP, but it didn't make it any less important in run scoring. They may have placed too much on batting average in the old days, and now place too little. The real answer is somewhere between what they do now and the era when it was the end all be all.
Then you can pick apart the way any individual stat is done. There are people on this thread saying things like reached on error should be counted in OBP and sac hits and sac flies should be treated the same and not count as a PA. (I highly disagree with this, as a sac bunt is an order for you to sacrifice yourself, and a sac fly is mostly just guys trying to get hits that their out is deep enough. They want it to be a deep hit.) But it is a valid nitpick.
There are plethora of people, including Joe's Mom, that have trouble with errors and how they figure into stats. There are people worrying about ERA on this thread with an extreme situation to back it up, but there are things that happen. I have seen a starter, not a good pitcher, but with an ERA too high for what he gave up, and a little research led me to the fact that every single time he left the mound in an inning, the reliever allowed all the inherited runs to score. (The only time I have ever seen this.) There are people that want reached on error to count as a time on base (but many less that want it counted as a hit, which is strange.)
My favorite is the strikeout, which was once given too much importance on the offensive side, and now they ignore them completely. While it was always given some importance from the pitcher's side, it is now the be all end all. The result is that an occurrence that has the same positive and negative affect for each side of the ball is so ridiculously far apart in how it is viewed. On the pitching side it is the most important thing out there. On the batter's side thre is no two strike approach and is viewed like any other out. If you can't tell that at least one side (perhaps both) is wrong and that it has the same affect on both sides, I can't help you. But Baseball is filled with and taught by almost exclusively men who do not.
The other fun part is the reliance on OPS. Taking two things with different denominators to make an easy stat using a child's math. Does it give a basic thing in that higher (at least a lot higher) is generally better? Sure. Is it accurate in determining which of two guys that are close but get there different ways? Not at all.
It is just easy. You can put it on scorecard like the KBO. You can use it on the TV graphic which they do here. It is established and people understand and it is not misleading in at least a broad sense, so it is here to stay.
Also, like average, pitcher wins, which have always been one of the easiest stats to nitpick, were for many years the same basis of the Cy Young award, much of the Hall, and now they are pretty much not considered at all. The answer again is somewhere in the middle.
Us older fans were indoctrinated with average and Wins. They were given too much importance then and are ignored now. Some of us realized they were given too much credit long ago. Some of us realize they are a bit too ignored now. Some people just want everything the same so they feel uncomfortable and yell at clouds.
I guess I sorta miss the 300/400/500 slash line to distinguish elite hitters, but since Joseph Daniel Votto dipped below 300 late in his career ( while maintaining a 400+ obp) I haven't cared too much...
Unless I've missed someone, the last players to retire over that are Chipper Jones (2012) and Todd Helton (2013). Before the Selig Era, I think you need to go back to players who started their careers before integration (Teddy Ballgame, Stan the Man) to find any as all time greats like Mantle, Mays, Aaron, and the other stars from the 50s through the 80s came up short.
I suppose seeing that slash lines in an individual season still says something. I still believe Manny B Manny and Edgar to be inner circle hitters from the right side and Pujols has a bunch of those seasons before he turned 30.
Mostly I think it shows how little the 300 part of that slash matters.
I used to call 300/400/500 an "MVP type season." Not all won the award (e.g. Wade Boggs in 1987: 363 / 461 / 588 ... barely cracked the top 10 in voting) but they were all great hitting seasons.
Then came the Selig years with inflated balls (and players) and guys like Brian Giles - very good, but far from great hitters - would routinely meet that level.
There is an appeal to statistics that are simple and easy to understand. Sure, batting average is flawed. But so are weighted statistics like WAR.
But I can explain BA and OBP and ERA and RBI to the uninitiated in two minutes or less. I can watch a single play on a game and quickly grasp how it will affect those stats.
Has anyone watched a WAR “occur” on the field? Can 99% of the people who spout WAR all the time explain it or calculate with given a week and a calculator?
They should move the mound back six inches. Hits ARE more fun to watch than walks. Two free throws counts the same as a eurostep reverse layup but nobody pays to watch free throws.
The avalanche of strike outs is certainly partly because power matters most mathematically but they're also exploding because everyone throws 100. The last time there was so little offensive action they lowered the mound. Move it back 6 inches.
Reggie Jackson badly wanted to hit .300 at least once. He had a chance in 1980. He hits a triple in his first AB in the final game, improving his average to .299610, then is intentionally removed. He knows he's close enough. They round up. It says .300 on every baseball card and reference page.
It bothered Mickey Mantle that a poor final season kicked his career batting average under .300.
I remember Buck Showalter's question when people would tell him about the latest advanced stat for offense.
"What's .300?"
His point is that even the most casual of baseball fans know what a .300 hitter is and what a .300 average means. It's part of the lingo even as we've learned about the many better stats to measure offensive performance.
I'm exactly the same way. What's the .300 equivalent in OBS, SLG, WRC+, etc. et. etc. Otherwise, I can't really tell if someone is good, bad, indifferent. (OK, all the "+" stats are centered on 100, so I guess it's easy to tell who's average. But what counts as elite, that's the question.)
Batting average isn't silly. What's silly is constantly thinking we've discovered something that our ancestors were too stupid to comprehend.
They understood perfectly well that a game where players hit the ball more often and with better precision is a more entertaining game than one where you constantly see the bases loaded with 0 outs leading to no runs. That watching an elite player like Tony Gwynn means being able to expect your favorite player to get a base hit almost every game, and multiple hits in most of those, and that that was something worth tuning in every day for.
They may not have been able to articulate why batting average was the most important stat, but they knew it intuitively. We ignored that wisdom and called it silly, and now we have a game that kind of sucks to watch. I think at some point it's appropriate to admit we were wrong. Optimizing for every win does not make the game better.
Baseball is a far less engaging sport with a
.240 batting average.
(Whoops)