Not the batting average- the average performance of the entire league. In the beginning, and I mean way back into the 1800s, nobody really kept stats, and even when they started to keep stats and formed organized professional leagues, its not like they started with our concrete benchmarks of what is and isn’t good. You’d have to gather several years worth of stats before you could really determine which guys are pulling apart from the pack, which guys can’t keep up, and where all the guys in the middle fall. Even then, though, you’re only talking about one generation of players, so any benchmarks you try to set just from that can be vastly blown away or not lived up to by the next generation.

In modern terms you would use the kind of basic statistical analysis you learn in high school and apply it to baseball data. It’s easier these days for us to make this call because we’re dealing with 100+ years of data, and can see what did and didn’t drastically change as various parts of the game evolved (think the advents of astroturf and the DH, expansion and the inevitably thinner talent pool, extension to a 5 man rotation, etc.) When you look at all of the data you can see the “master batting average,” so to speak, that is the calculated batting average of every player rolled into one number, probably somewhere in the high .260s. You then work out one standard deviation in both directions (which I don’t know because I haven’t actually crunched all these numbers). So for argument’s sake let’s say our master average is .265 with a .030 point standard deviation. That means about .235 is the absolute lowest you’ll want to accept from anybody, and the guys hitting .295 are approaching elite status. About seventy percent of performers will fall within one standard deviation either way, leaving about fifteen percent at below our acceptable mark and another fifteen percent above it. The guys hitting under .235 in this instance we would want to supplant with guys hitting at least .235. In contrast, the echelon hitting over .295 is the hitting elite, the top of their class.

If you apply the same methods across categories it’s fairly easy to see why batting is skewed that way- it’s just a more difficult skill. Record is exceptionally easy to measure- either a guys is pitching around .500 or he’s above or below, the nature of the stat is self-explanatory and gives you the above/below average indicator without any effort. But when you realize a perfectly average hitter can only muster .265, suddenly hitting over .300, or more than one standard deviation away, is what you read as excellent. Then you realize that the 2-deviation mark is .325, so the guys competing for the batting title, which will only be about 2-2.5% of all performers, are the elite of the elite, and every team would die to have just one of these guys. Conversely, the guys hitting under .205 are the ones that you probably don’t even consider for backup catching duties unless you have absolutely no other choice, they are in an abysmal class all their own. It’s not so much a baseball question as it is a basic stats question, it all become clear when you know where the mean is.

BTW- I’m a political science student and that is about the sum total of my mathematics knowledge.

Why are apples and oranges different?

That’s just the default. They always say, good pitching beats good hitting. Well, bad pitching also beats good hitting sometimes. Just reality.

The bottom line is if you are gonna have surgery you’re gonna want the surgeon that has the best survival/recovery rate whatever it may be.

If you need a hit you are gonna want the best hitter out there regardless of what they are hitting. That guy is only gonna be hitting somewhere in the .300’s.

It just goes to show you that hittinig a 99 mph fastball when you don’t know it’s coming is harder than a successful triple bypass surgery…and some people wonder why they are making millions.

On a tangent if said surgeon had to perform say 600 surgery’s a year in front of say 30,000 of his patients most loyal friends and family screaming at the top of their lungs success rates would surely plummet!

Batting avg. to me, is really only an indicator of what KIND of hitter a player is. You have to view it in context, along with OBP and SLG to get a better idea of what a particular player’s BA means.

In general, BA alone is really only important if it’s exceptionally high, or exceptionally low. Otherwise, you NEED something else.