All right, now we're going to look at some offensive statistics, which of, the first one, the most important one, is batting average. Now if you look down here at our paper, you'll see how to tally batting average. What you do is you take the number of hits that a batter gets in a particular game, and you divide that by the number of at bats he had. Now a hit is anytime he hits the ball and reaches base safely. That could be a single, it could be a double, it can be a triple, it can be a home run -- any time he reaches base safely via a hit. Now an at bat is any time the batter comes up to the plate and has a fair chance to reach base. An at bat is any time he gets a hit, any time he reaches base on an error, any time he puts the ball into play and gets out. Things that don't count as an at bat are walks or hit by pitches. So if he gets on base via getting four balls, or if he gets hit by the pitch, that does not count as an at bat. For our purposes here, we're going to say that batter A, Mike Mustafa, was up to bat four times, and he got two hits. So what we do is we take the number of hits, which is two, and we divide that by the number of at bats, which is four, and that means that he got on 50% of the time for a 500 batting average. Now, if Mike had come up to bat three times and got two hits, then we would divide two by three, and that would be a 6666 batting average. If Mike came up three times and got one hit, then it would be a 3333 batting average. So you always have to calculate batting average in baseball because it let's you know how successful a particular batter is in any given game, and it's a very important statistic.
