Posted by: Ted K (tpk@sensorsys.com) on Wed Jul 4 00:07:03 2001

Joe,

Your analysis is overly simplistic.

Consider that we are interested in the sucess rate of hitting as defined in terms of hitting a fair ball that is either a traditional hit or genrates an out or leads to a an error.

Lets call the success a combination of a real hit as currently defined and "virtual hits" where it is a fair ball that leads to an out or an error by a fielder.

Your contention is that this overall hitting success is a high percentage of at bats.

My argument is that at bats no longer is the proper divisor -- rather one needs to consider the success number in terms of total number of swings that are attempts to strike the ball including called strikes.

For instance, consider the case of a player who throws has 12 pitches throw to him for an at bat:
3 are balls
2 are called strikes
6 are foul balls that are unplayable
1 may be fair and in play for a hit or an out or foul and caught to end the at bat

I ignore the pathalogical cases where the batter is hit by a pitch, intensionally walked, left at the plate because of another play on the field, erased from the records due to the game being called because of rain, or ejected by the Umpire for arguing a call.

that player by your method of computing an average has had at least 7 attempts for 1 "hit"

If the called strikes are replaced by swinging non contact strikes then the player has had at least 9 tries to generate one hit

He could in fact have begun the swing on all of the 12 pitches but sucessfully held up on the three called as balls.

While 12 is not a typical number (though I've personally witnessed more than 15 pitches to a single batter), a combination of 3 fouls and 2 swinging strikes is quite common -- that yields a corrected average of 1 "hit" in 5 attempts or 0.200 corrected average

Of course, there is the occasional real or virtual "hit" on a single pitch favored by the Nomar Garcia Paras, etc., that would give you a corrected average for that at bat of 1.00

So, if you plan to reevaluate the difficulty of hitting I suggest collecting some fairly extensive statistics of (total number of real hits + "virtual hits") divided by (total number of called strikes + pitches swung on for either fouls or fair balls) and see if it comes out higher or lower than traditional batting averages. My guess is that you will find the traditional average exagerates the success. Hitting is considerably harder than you have suggested.

I've played softball and watched baseball for several decades and I still think its pretty amazing to see someone consitently hit over .300 (especially when you have to face a Pedro Martinez or a Roger Clemmens from time to time).

Ted