Why are there so few .300 hitters in Major League Baseball?
The .400 hitter in baseball died with Ted Williams, no matter what Miami Marlins infielder Luis Arraez is hitting, which is .389. What’s more surprising and alarming: The .300 hitter is sick, and while he might not die off completely, he’s worthy of protection and observation.
What Arraez is doing — rapping out 118 hits in his first 79 games — is impressive and worthy of attention and not just because he was above .400 as recently as June 25. It’s because this is not the direction baseball is heading. Hitting has always been hard. In the 2020s, it’s as hard as it has been in a half-century — maybe longer.
After Sunday, 153 players had enough plate appearances to qualify for the major league lead in batting average. Ten of them were hitting .300 or better. If that holds — and we still have more than half the season to play, so it’s a sizable “if” — it will be the smallest group of .300 hitters since just six reached that mark in 1968, the infamous Year of the Pitcher.
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This isn’t a blip. It’s a trend. Last year, just 11 players hit .300 or better. From 2010 to 2019, baseball averaged 22.1 .300 hitters per season and never had fewer than 16. In the previous decade, the sport averaged 39.7 .300 hitters, never fewer than 33 and as many as 53 in 2000.
Now, batting average long has been outdated as an effective tool to evaluate a player’s offensive contributions because it considers only a very narrow aspect of a player’s game: how often he reaches base via a hit. It doesn’t take into account how regularly he walks or how much power he provides. On-base-plus-slugging percentage is the most accessible number that absorbs both the ability to get on base and the ability to hit for extra bases. It’s much more useful.
Still, I would argue that most fans — and most players and most writers — still have a more intuitive understanding of what a .300 hitter is than, say, what carrying an .850 OPS means. The number carries history and romance. So in that way, it’s still relevant.
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But if there are fewer .300 hitters all the time, then hitting .300 doesn’t mean the same as it did 10 or 20 or 40 years ago. The mind needs to adjust.
There are a zillion reasons for this, none more important than the axis around which all of baseball revolves: velocity. Since 2007 and the inception of PitchF/x technology — which quantified the speed and break of pitches — average fastball velocity has risen every season (with the exception of a small downtick in the pandemic-shortened 2020 campaign). An average fastball in 2007: 91.1 mph. An average fastball this year: 93.9 mph. That’s an astounding difference.
Throw in the fact that hitters see the same pitchers less frequently because starters are throwing fewer innings than ever before and that — until this season — many teams employed defensive shifts that positioned fielders in the area a specific hitter was most likely to hit the ball, and the average major league hitter now doesn’t look, statistically, anything like he did over the previous generation.
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The collective .243 average of hitters across baseball last season was the lowest since 1968, after which MLB lowered the mound to a standard height of 10 inches and adjusted the strike zone. The sweeping rule changes this past offseason — most importantly the institution of a pitch clock and the banning of extreme defensive shifts — have helped tick that up to .248 as the season reaches its midpoint. Still, that number, if it holds, would tie for the fourth-lowest collective average in the past half-century.
So if it’s more difficult for all of MLB to hit, then it’s more difficult for individual players to do the same. Since Williams hit .406 in 1941, just four players have posted a higher average than .380 over a whole season: Williams (.388 in 1957), Tony Gwynn (.394 in strike-shortened 1994), George Brett (.390 in 1980) and Rod Carew (.388 in 1977). What Arraez is doing now — and a significant reason it’s highly likely he will finish the year with a lower average than any of the above players — is more of a statistical outlier relative to the majors than what any of the other guys did. The MLB averages: .258 in 1957, .270 in 1994, .265 in 1980 and .264 in 1977.
So, then, the gaps between those .400 flirters and the average hitters in the majors that year: 130 points for Williams, 125 for Brett and 124 for Gwynn and Carew. The gap between Arraez and MLB’s collective .248 entering Saturday was 141 points.
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That’s a lot of numbers, and this is exceptionally nerdy stuff. But the fallout of it all is that how we process information about a game we think we know so well has to change. What, for instance, would you say an average major leaguer hits? My brain kind of lands on .260 or .265. In today’s game, that’s above average. A guy who hits .248, not long ago, might have had a tough time staying in the lineup. Now he’s average.
Thus, in the current environment, an appreciation for those who can hit .300. After Sunday, they were: Arraez, Atlanta’s Ronald Acuña Jr. (.336), Tampa Bay’s Yandy Díaz (.318), Toronto’s Bo Bichette (.317), Philadelphia’s Nick Castellanos (.316), Freddie Freeman of the Los Angeles Dodgers (.315), Baltimore’s Austin Hays (.312), Shohei Ohtani of the Los Angeles Angels (.306), Boston’s Masataka Yoshida (.305) and the Cleveland Guardians’ Josh Naylor (.301). Batting average might be a one-dimensional stat. But the game is continuing to change, so the standards by which we evaluate players has to follow.
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