Batting average (baseball)

In baseball, batting average (BA) is determined by dividing a player's hits by their total at-bats. It is usually rounded to three decimal places and read without the decimal: A player with a batting average of .300 is said to be "batting three hundred". If necessary to break ties, batting averages could be taken beyond the .001 measurement. In this context, .001 is considered a "point", such that a .235 batter is five points higher than a .230 batter.

History

Henry Chadwick, an English statistician raised on cricket, was an influential figure in the early history of baseball. He is credited with creating the modern box score, in 1859, and the practice of denoting a strikeout with a "K". Chadwick wrote in 1869: "In making up a score at the close of the match the record should be as follows:–Name of player, total number of times the first base was made by clean hits, total bases so made, left on bases after clean hits, and the number of times the first base has been made on errors..." This led to the recording of "clean" hits—times a batter reached base without benefit of an error. In 1869, another early baseball proponent, Alfred Wright, published an end-of-season summary that included the average number of times a batter had "clean" hits on a per game basis. In 1871, a writer for the New York Clipper, Hervie Dobson, proposed that a batter's "average is found by dividing his total 'times first base on clean hits' by his total number of times he went to the bat"—hits divided by at bats. By 1874, some teams were calculating batting averages, and by 1876, it was being calculated by all teams of the National League.