It has long been baseball’s intent to convert every human endeavor to a bloodless number, to carry out the whole of a man’s life to three decimal places.
Really, what do we know about B.J. Upton? His likes and dislikes? His stance on the major issues of the day? Paper or plastic, Coke or Pepsi, Google or Bing?
All we know for sure, and all we really need to know, is this: He was hitting .175 entering the weekend series in Philadelphia.
Contained in a single computation, the simple product of dividing hits by at-bats, is the shorthand for Upton’s entire existence in Atlanta. One elemental quotient transformed into a your-mama level insult. An inescapable slur flashed on the big board at Turner Field for all the world to cluck over each time Upton lights in the batter’s box.
The fact that the Braves’ two highest-paid players went into the first weekend of July both hitting under .200 — Dan Uggla slipped back below the Mendoza Line with his last at-bat Thursday — is one of the persistent concerns for a first-place team.
Among those who study the numbers, such as the members of baseball’s version of the Freemasons, the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR), the batting average is a hotly disputed measure of a hitter’s worth.
It was one of the first measures, a 19th century device reportedly first employed by an English statistician with cricket leanings, Henry Chadwick. Over time, the stats community has invented many exotic indications of production — the slugging percentage, the on-base percentage, the combination of the two, and that most esoteric, quarterback-rating kind of mystery tabulation, Wins Above Replacement (WAR).
One can easily get lost in the rising tide of numbers. “On-base percentage is the gateway drug for getting involved with more advanced stuff,” joked Atlanta’s Russell Carleton, who writes for Baseball Prospectus.
The president of Atlanta’s SABR chapter, Mil Fisher, still finds the humble batting average to be quite useful. In the Braves’ case, he said, it is an honest estimation of the team’s over-reliance on power above contact hitting (they rank 20th in the majors in team average).
Throughout baseball, he said, the batting average has been discounted, to the detriment of all. “The thrust has changed from having a high batting average to having a power game — but that doesn’t mean that it’s good,” Fisher said.
His vice president, John Hill, conversely, stated that the batting average holds “relatively little” value as a catch-all number for plate production. It is easy and convenient and ingrained into the lore of the game, but incomplete, he would argue.
“By now everyone knows that batting average is not the ideal measure of a hitter,” he said. “Batting average is like Churchill’s (estimation of) democracy: The worst form of government … except for all the others.”
Those who pick at the stat take aim at what the number doesn’t do. It doesn’t take into account or give credit to walks, reaching base on an error, situational hitting. It counts all hits as equal, as misguided some say as measuring a man’s wealth by just counting the number of coins in his pocket, not their value.
Take for instance Tuesday night against the Marlins. In one at bat, Brian McCann’s average slipped two points for doing his job — hitting a ground ball to the right side to advance a runner from second to third. Uggla’s likewise eroded after driving in a run with a ground-ball out.
There exists yet another number that seeks to take all that into account, something grandly called the “true average.” It is a proprietary blend of stats run by Baseball Prospectus that arrives at a value familiar to the everyday fan, in which a .300 is still really good, .260 is the league average and anything around .200 is the work of the walking dead.
According to Baseball Prospectus, Uggla’s “true average” as of July 4 was much higher than his traditional average — .264. That, in fact, was 14 points higher than Jason Heyward’s. And by the more common formula, Heyward was hitting 29 points higher than Uggla (.228-.199).
The recalculation does little to mitigate B.J. Upton’s first half; his “true average” was at .218.
That still hovers perilously close to the so-called Mendoza Line of .200, baseball’s time-honored baseline of hitting futility. The term was coined around 1980 in reference to Seattle and Pittsburgh shortstop Mario Mendoza (whose career average actually was .215). George Brett forever cemented Mendoza’s place in ridicule with his quote: “The first thing I look for in the Sunday papers is who is below the Mendoza line.”
Hitters come and go, but the standard for under-performance has not been adjusted through the years. No matter the squabbles over the relative worth of the batting average, the Mendoza Line still represents the most readily accepted cutoff line for competence.
Uggla would not disagree.
“I know that hitting .200 is unacceptable,” he said. “I’ve had years where I hit .230/.240 with 30-some bombs and 90 to 100 RBIs. I’m OK with that. But you got to hit 30 to make it work (he had 14 home runs going to Philadelphia).”
His 105 strikeouts lead the National League and have contributed greatly to the sagging batting average. Again, Uggla played the “unacceptable” card.
“Regardless of anything I’ve been battling (vision problems), you got to find a way to put the ball in play,” he said.
Averages can be rehabbed, in a sometimes slow, painful process. Heyward fell under .200 in the third game of the season, and detoured by an appendectomy, he didn’t see the other side of that for better than two months. Hitting .312 in June, he seriously began the long slog back to respectability.
“There’s not a lot I can do about (the average) as far as thinking about it,” Heyward said. “Just go out there and put up the best at-bat I can. If I’m focused that way, it’s going to be a pretty good result.
“This is not about one batting average or another. Of course, the higher the batting averages, the more production, the better. Dan, B.J. and myself, batting average-wise have not been not the best, but we’ve done some good things for the team.”
Imperfect as it may be, the batting average will continue to be the go-to stat for those requiring an instant picture of a hitter’s worth. A man still must at the very least hit above his weight to avoid the cruelest kind of jabs.
There is time for Upton and Uggla to fix that, with months remaining in the season to either pick it up at the plate or go on a serious diet.
