Believe it: It’s time to retire batting average
JOE POSNANSKI
Kansas City Star
Years ago, Peppermint Patty from the old “Peanuts” comics believed that an angel had given her a very important message to spread to the world. The message was: If a foul ball is hit behind third base, it is the shortstop’s play.
“I expect to be persecuted,” she said.
I have no angel. But I do have a message for America. For a long while, I thought my message was “Coaches need to stop using the two-point conversion chart.” But I can see now that was not important enough. No, I have a higher calling.
My message is this: It’s time to get rid of batting average.
OK, I know I will be persecuted, too. I know the batting average statistic is as American as blue jeans, traffic and weather together on the nines and George Will. I know that batting average is ingrained in us. It’s everywhere you turn.
But have you ever stopped to ponder how dumb a statistic batting average is? I would hope not. I would hope you have more important things to think about.
But I don’t. I can tell you: Batting average is a dumb statistic.
Don’t believe it? Consider this: If you bunt a runner from first to second, that’s considered a “sacrifice.” And it doesn’t count against your batting average. That’s great. But if you hit a ground ball to the right side of the infield and move a runner from second to third, well that’s not considered a sacrifice. That counts as an out.
Why? Nobody knows.
How about this: You hit a slow grounder to short, but you run your heart out and force the shortstop to rush. He throws the ball away. According to batting average, you’re out. Of course, you’re not out. You’re safe. You’re standing at second base. But you count as out. Your batting average just went down.
Next time up, you hit a lazy pop-up to center field. The guy isn’t wearing his sunglasses. He loses the ball in the sun and lets it drop. Now, that counts as a hit. Your batting average just went up.
Mostly, there’s the entire walk and hit-by-pitch situation. These are a pretty big part of the game. And they don’t count at all in batting average. It’s like they never happened. You can foul off 17 pitches and draw your walk. It counts as no at-bat. Your batting average remains the same. You get hit in the ribs by a 95-mph Roger Clemens fastball. No at-bat. Your batting average remains the same.
There’s no other statistic in sports that is so misleading, so incomplete, so lacking. Batting average does tell you something, but it doesn’t tell you much. It’s like watching a movie through a keyhole. I asked author Bill James to describe batting average in real-life terms. He said using batting average to rate a player’s hitting ability is like:
■ Rating a novel by the number of words per page.
■ Rating the safety of investment by how often the bank is held up.
■ Rating doctors by the number of patients they see per day.
■ Rating parties by the average number of drinks.
■ Rating zoos by the number of elephants.
And so on.
This is fine. There are a lot of bad statistics in sports. Quarterback rating. What is that? The problem is, in baseball, batting average is absolutely everything. On television, they show you the guy’s batting average. On the radio, they tell you his average. In newspapers, we rank players by their average. If a guy has the highest average, he’s called the batting champion. If a team has the highest batting average, they are said to be the best-hitting team in the league.
In these enlightened, Moneyball, fantasy-baseball times, we will still rate hitters almost entirely by their batting averages.
It’s ridiculous. Take Ken Harvey. Please. A season ago, Harvey, the Royals’ first baseman, hit .287, which tied him for the team lead. And yet he started this year in Class AAA Omaha. This led to a minor uproar — how could the Royals’ best hitter be in Omaha? The answer was simple: Ken Harvey was nothing close to the Royals’ best hitter. Sure, he did hit for a pretty good average. But he wouldn’t take a walk. He would, in fact, swing at pitches so far out of the strike zone, they would need a passport to get in. So his on-base percentage (which accounts for walks) was actually 11 points lower than the average American League first baseman. He did not hit for any power, so his slugging percentage was 30 points lower than the average AL first baseman.
In other words, Harvey was a well-below-average first baseman who honestly earned his place in Omaha. But you would never know it by looking at his batting average.
The opposite is true, too. One of my favorite players ever is Jimmy Wynn. They called him “The Toy Cannon.” He hit .250 for his career in the 1960s and ’70s. He never once came close to hitting .300 for a season. But he was a terrific player who walked 100 times a year and spent most of his career in one of the worst hitter’s parks in the history of baseball, the Houston Astrodome. James, in his Historical Baseball Abstract, ranks Wynn as the 10th best all-around center fielder of all-time — behind nine Hall of Famers.
Yet because of the low batting average, Wynn never got his due.
There are a lot of players like Wynn who never were appreciated enough because of relatively low batting averages — Bobby Grich, John Mayberry, Bob Allison, Darrell Evans, Boog Powell, Toby Harrah and Roy White, to name a few. They got on base. They hit for power. Those things matter. Batting average doesn’t.
It’s time. I’m not sure which statistic we should use in its place. The trendy statistic now is OPS — on-base percentage plus slugging percentage — but that has its own flaws. There is “secondary average,” which takes into account total bases, walks, stolen bases. There is plain old on-base percentage, which I like. There are plenty of options.
But wherever we turn, batting average has to go. Batting average is the horse and buggy. It is black-and-white television. Its time has passed. I don’t know how we go about getting rid of it, though. Lately, Congress has shown a lot of interest in baseball; maybe we could get them to forget about steroids and pass a constitutional amendment.
“I think this is too important an issue to be dealt with by trivial measures like a constitutional amendment,” Bill James said. “That’s just putting a Band-Aid on it.”
JOE POSNANSKI
Kansas City Star
Years ago, Peppermint Patty from the old “Peanuts” comics believed that an angel had given her a very important message to spread to the world. The message was: If a foul ball is hit behind third base, it is the shortstop’s play.
“I expect to be persecuted,” she said.
I have no angel. But I do have a message for America. For a long while, I thought my message was “Coaches need to stop using the two-point conversion chart.” But I can see now that was not important enough. No, I have a higher calling.
My message is this: It’s time to get rid of batting average.
OK, I know I will be persecuted, too. I know the batting average statistic is as American as blue jeans, traffic and weather together on the nines and George Will. I know that batting average is ingrained in us. It’s everywhere you turn.
But have you ever stopped to ponder how dumb a statistic batting average is? I would hope not. I would hope you have more important things to think about.
But I don’t. I can tell you: Batting average is a dumb statistic.
Don’t believe it? Consider this: If you bunt a runner from first to second, that’s considered a “sacrifice.” And it doesn’t count against your batting average. That’s great. But if you hit a ground ball to the right side of the infield and move a runner from second to third, well that’s not considered a sacrifice. That counts as an out.
Why? Nobody knows.
How about this: You hit a slow grounder to short, but you run your heart out and force the shortstop to rush. He throws the ball away. According to batting average, you’re out. Of course, you’re not out. You’re safe. You’re standing at second base. But you count as out. Your batting average just went down.
Next time up, you hit a lazy pop-up to center field. The guy isn’t wearing his sunglasses. He loses the ball in the sun and lets it drop. Now, that counts as a hit. Your batting average just went up.
Mostly, there’s the entire walk and hit-by-pitch situation. These are a pretty big part of the game. And they don’t count at all in batting average. It’s like they never happened. You can foul off 17 pitches and draw your walk. It counts as no at-bat. Your batting average remains the same. You get hit in the ribs by a 95-mph Roger Clemens fastball. No at-bat. Your batting average remains the same.
There’s no other statistic in sports that is so misleading, so incomplete, so lacking. Batting average does tell you something, but it doesn’t tell you much. It’s like watching a movie through a keyhole. I asked author Bill James to describe batting average in real-life terms. He said using batting average to rate a player’s hitting ability is like:
■ Rating a novel by the number of words per page.
■ Rating the safety of investment by how often the bank is held up.
■ Rating doctors by the number of patients they see per day.
■ Rating parties by the average number of drinks.
■ Rating zoos by the number of elephants.
And so on.
This is fine. There are a lot of bad statistics in sports. Quarterback rating. What is that? The problem is, in baseball, batting average is absolutely everything. On television, they show you the guy’s batting average. On the radio, they tell you his average. In newspapers, we rank players by their average. If a guy has the highest average, he’s called the batting champion. If a team has the highest batting average, they are said to be the best-hitting team in the league.
In these enlightened, Moneyball, fantasy-baseball times, we will still rate hitters almost entirely by their batting averages.
It’s ridiculous. Take Ken Harvey. Please. A season ago, Harvey, the Royals’ first baseman, hit .287, which tied him for the team lead. And yet he started this year in Class AAA Omaha. This led to a minor uproar — how could the Royals’ best hitter be in Omaha? The answer was simple: Ken Harvey was nothing close to the Royals’ best hitter. Sure, he did hit for a pretty good average. But he wouldn’t take a walk. He would, in fact, swing at pitches so far out of the strike zone, they would need a passport to get in. So his on-base percentage (which accounts for walks) was actually 11 points lower than the average American League first baseman. He did not hit for any power, so his slugging percentage was 30 points lower than the average AL first baseman.
In other words, Harvey was a well-below-average first baseman who honestly earned his place in Omaha. But you would never know it by looking at his batting average.
The opposite is true, too. One of my favorite players ever is Jimmy Wynn. They called him “The Toy Cannon.” He hit .250 for his career in the 1960s and ’70s. He never once came close to hitting .300 for a season. But he was a terrific player who walked 100 times a year and spent most of his career in one of the worst hitter’s parks in the history of baseball, the Houston Astrodome. James, in his Historical Baseball Abstract, ranks Wynn as the 10th best all-around center fielder of all-time — behind nine Hall of Famers.
Yet because of the low batting average, Wynn never got his due.
There are a lot of players like Wynn who never were appreciated enough because of relatively low batting averages — Bobby Grich, John Mayberry, Bob Allison, Darrell Evans, Boog Powell, Toby Harrah and Roy White, to name a few. They got on base. They hit for power. Those things matter. Batting average doesn’t.
It’s time. I’m not sure which statistic we should use in its place. The trendy statistic now is OPS — on-base percentage plus slugging percentage — but that has its own flaws. There is “secondary average,” which takes into account total bases, walks, stolen bases. There is plain old on-base percentage, which I like. There are plenty of options.
But wherever we turn, batting average has to go. Batting average is the horse and buggy. It is black-and-white television. Its time has passed. I don’t know how we go about getting rid of it, though. Lately, Congress has shown a lot of interest in baseball; maybe we could get them to forget about steroids and pass a constitutional amendment.
“I think this is too important an issue to be dealt with by trivial measures like a constitutional amendment,” Bill James said. “That’s just putting a Band-Aid on it.”
