wondercat 🌺

Great question, John. For most of baseball history, the walk was sneered at -- a lesser form of getting on base compared to the exceptional skill it takes to swing. The analytical revolution in the game changed that. If the objective of the game is to outscore a team, then the likeliest way to score runs is for people to get on base. Post-Moneyball, on-base percentage replaced batting average as more reliable metric for helping produce runs. Batting average was almost a victim of its own popularity, though. Because it does matter. It's just not the first determinant of a baseball player's quality. Sometimes I do fear the pendulum has swung too far in the anti-batting-average direction. Let's take three players as examples, with their batting averages, on-base percentages and slugging percentages: Manny Machado: .302/.361/.507 Juan Soto: .248/.383/.486 Eugenio Suárez: .248/.319/.572 Three totally different hitters. Machado is balanced and batting average-heavy. Soto’s average is deflated but he’s an on-base savant thanks to the highest walk rate in the major leagues. Suárez is a masher whose high slug is his calling card. So who’s the best? Well, if you’re judging by a metric called weighted on-base average, which seeks to be a catch-all offensive number that is park-neutral … they are pretty much identical. It goes to show: Offensively, there are plenty of ways to be really good. A great batting average is never a bad thing. But a poor one, as Soto and Suárez illustrate, does not doom you to mediocrity.