Baseball Statistics

Today I am going to talk about baseball statistics because I love baseball and the secret language behind it. There are two statistics from this secret language that I am going to teach to you about. But first I am going to talk about the basics of batting.

A batter has a chance to hit a ball with up to three strikes and four balls. This is called an “at bat.” There are three things that could happen when a hitter is at bat. The first one is that you could strike out by getting three strikes. The second is that you could get four balls and then you walk to first base. The final is that you could get a hit.

The first statistic I will tell you about is batting average. Batting average is very simple once you learn it. All you have to do is divide hits by at bats. For instance, my favorite player Cody Bellinger, who was not doing so well this year, had low batting average, but I just want to explain the equation. He had 52 hits and 315 at bats. So the equation would be 52 divided by 315 which equals .165. He would be batting 165 out of 1000.

Now the last statistic I will be teaching you today is OBP, which stands for “on base percentage.” OBP is just what it sounds like: the percentage of times you get on base. You can get on base by hitting a ball or getting a walk. OBP is kind of like batting average, but the difference is you add the hits and the walks together and whatever that equals, you divide that by your at bats. Then once you do the equation, that is your on base percentage. For example, for Mookie Betts’s OBP you add his hits (123) and walks (48) which equals 171. Then you divide 171 by his 466 at bats which equals .367. So that would be Betts’s OBP.

One less common and more painful way of getting on base is to get hit by a pitch, or HBP. Some batters actually have a skill for this! Hall of famer Craig Biggio was hit by 285 pitches in his career!