Baseball Musings
Baseball Musings
October 01, 2007
Ordonez at the Top

Roar of the Tigers celebrates Magglio Ordonez's batting championship:

You and I know full well that batting average is not a good way to get a comprehensive look at a player's value on the field (I misspelled at least 5 words in that sentence fragment, including a mash-up of 'on' and 'the' into some mutant word that looked like 'onthne'. This was how I knew it was time for me to go to sleep and finish this post in the morning. 100% fact), but that's why the Batting Title is so nice. It has no pretensions. It doesn't really try to say, "this ballplayer is the best hitter." All it does is say, "this dude had the highest batting average at the end of the season, and that is something to celebrate." It says, "I don't really care if the dude was hitting homeruns or dribbling singles, the point is that he put his bat on the ball in a productive way a lot this year and that is a separate skill." It says, "boo yah! Eat it, Mauer."

Batting average was designed to award a batting crown, and it does that very well. It's not a stat that should be used much beyond that, however. Batting average recognizes that the game is about hitting. Walks are very valuable, but fans in general like to see hits. Hits cause action. They move runners and force fielders to make plays. Hits are where the action is. So batting average does a nice job of picking the best hitters without hurting players who also draw a lot of walks. So you can win a batting title like Wade Boggs, who drew tons of walks to keep his batting average denominator low, or like Ichiro Suzuki, who collects a lot of hits to keep the batting average numerator high. Both are valuable, but you have to get hits.

The NL race isn't quite finished yet, as a Matt Holliday 0 for 5 gives the title to Chipper Jones by going to the 10,000th place.


Posted by David Pinto at 11:57 AM | Awards | TrackBack (0)
Comments

Don't you mean Suzuki gets a lot of leg hits, more than 50 infield hits this year. That is great leg work, great speed, but it isn't great hitting.

Posted by: Bob S at October 2, 2007 09:07 PM
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