How to Figure Batting Average

Batting average is one of the key stats in baseball, indicating how often a given player attains a hit at bat. While home runs are impressive and a low strikeout count is always desirable, batting average gauges a player's overall reliability at the plate. Calculating batting average is a simple task, which you can do for Little Leaguers and local leagues as well as professional players. All you require is some basic math skills and a knowledge of the player's specific stats.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Calculator

1. Count up the number of times the player has been at bat in the period you wish to measure. Most of the time, you want to measure every at-bat the player has had this season, but you can also calculate it by weekly appearances, monthly appearances, lifetime appearances and so forth.

2. Take the total number of at-bats and subtract the number of walks, sacrifices and instances when the batter was hit by a pitch. (Those incidents do not count as at-bats when calculating batting average.) The result is the "official" number of at-bats for figuring batting average.

3. Add up the number of hits the player has had over the period you wish to measure. This includes singles, doubles, triples and home runs. It does not include reaching base on an error or reaching base via a fielder's choice.

4. Divide the number of hits by the number of at-bats and round off the result to the third digit after the decimal. That number is the player's batting average. To read a batting average, view the number as a percentage of 1.000. An average of .333, for example, means that the player hits the ball one time out of every three at-bats, while an average of .250 means that he hits the ball one time out of every four at-bats.

Tips & Warnings

• A decent Major League batting average is considered to be about .275. All-star players will hit higher than that: .300 or above. Batting averages below .225 or so usually mean a poor batter, though those numbers can be excused if the player compensates in some other way. (Pitchers, for example, traditionally have poor batting averages.) Looking at the major league record books, most of the players with the highest lifetime batting averages played in a much earlier era of baseball (Ty Cobb is the all-time leader with .367 and experts don't believe he will be surpassed). This is likely because the game has since emphasized home runs far more than batting average, and players who hit a lot of home runs also tend to strike out more often (which lowers their batting average).

References

• How to calculate batting average

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