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How to Read Batting Stats: What Batting Average Misses

Baseball Notes · September 2026

The number you hear most often on a baseball broadcast is batting average. Even people who don't follow baseball have heard of a .300 hitter. But in modern baseball, batting average is only one of many ways to judge a hitter, and it is not even the most important one.

The batting average trap

Batting average is hits divided by at-bats. The problem is that this math ignores two things. The first is walks. In batting average, a walk simply never happened, so a hitter's ability to lay off bad pitches and get on base is erased entirely. The second is the quality of a hit. A single and a home run each count as one hit in batting average. Between a .280 power hitter and a .300 singles hitter, batting average alone cannot tell you who helps the team more.

On-base and slugging: two lenses

That is why two stats fill in what batting average misses.

• On-base percentage (OBP) is how often a hitter reaches base by any means. Hit, walk, or hit by pitch, it measures the ability to get on without making an out. Baseball is a game of surviving 27 outs, so not making outs is valuable in itself.
• Slugging percentage (SLG) is total bases per at-bat. Counting a single as 1, a double as 2, and a home run as 4, it shows how far one swing sends runners.

OPS: the simplest all-in-one report card

OPS is on-base percentage plus slugging percentage. The math is rough, but it sums up a hitter's overall offense surprisingly well, so modern baseball uses it far more often than batting average. Here is a rough sense of scale.

OPS	What it means
.900 and up	Offense that represents the league
.800s	Middle-of-the-order level
.700s	An average starter
.600s and below	Has to prove his value with defense or baserunning

The context behind the numbers

Reading stats takes context. A big home park cuts into slugging percentage, and the value of the same OPS shifts with whether the league as a whole favors hitters or pitchers. Position matters too. A .750 from a catcher or shortstop, who carry heavy defensive loads, is not the same number as a .750 from a designated hitter with little defensive load. Stats are a starting point for understanding a player, not a conclusion. Only when you read the numbers together with the conditions that produced them do you really see the hitter.