Talk:The Kid Who Batted 1.000

Batting average .000

An editor removed a parenthesized passage from the article, I have bolded the removed passage below to highlight it (its not bolded in the actual article:

Achieving a base on balls at every plate appearance actually gives one an on-base percentage of 1.000 rather than a batting average of 1.000 (in fact one's batting average would be expressed as .000)...

The editor's edit summary was "batting average with 0 ABs is undefined, not .000" and the editor has a point in that the calculation for batting average is [hits/at bats] (walks do not count as official at bats), and if your at-bats is zero is this an impossible calculation (see Division by zero).

However, the key part of the phrase here is "would be expressed as". As a matter of practice, I thought that in most instances of baseball statistics, the batting average of player with no at bats has a batting average expressed as ".000" rather than "---" or "undef" or whatever. Looking into it, I found that it isn't necessarily most, but seems to be about half.

Here's a passage from the Hall Of Fame website with a famous example of this:

Only once has each player on a team finished a game with the same batting average with which they started. That team was the 1940 Chicago White Sox, who entered and exited their April 16 game against the Cleveland Indians with a batting average of .000. The reason? Seventy-six years ago, Bob Feller threw the first Opening Day no-hitter in history.

In other words, each player started at .000 (having had no at bats) and ended at .000 (having had no hits) -- according to the Hall of Fame.

For our articles on baseball players, we typically give up to five sources for statistics: MLB, ESPN, Baseball Reference, Baseball Cube, and Fangraphs.

Here is ESPN, giving .000 batting averages to Giants with no at bats. So does FanGraphs, here

On the other hand, the Giants official site (the URL is too convoluted for the Wiki software to handle) gives a "-" batting average to players with no at bats. Here, Baseball Reference gives a blank (" ") batting average for players with no at bats. Major League Baseball itself gives "-" average to players with no at bats. So does Baseball Cube, here.

The Sporting News, a venerable and long a semi-official publication, appears to no longer maintain stats.

So lets see, that's two using .000, plus the Hall of Fame, and three using "-" or blank. So 3-3; I didn't include the Giant's official site since I'd have to check other teams, but if you want to include it that's 4-3 in favor of "-" or blank rather than .000. And yet... here is today's Giants box score from MLB, and they give Josh Osich, who has no at bats yet, an average of .000. So MLB itself is inconsistent.

Finally and FWIW, if my memory serves, stats always used used to use .000, certainly when the first book was written at least. That's why Feller's no-hitter is described as the .000 before-and-after game with no equivocation. It's possible my memory is faulty though.

All said and done, I'm personally comfortable with restoring the phrase but inserting an adverb: "(in fact one's batting average would _______ be expressed as .000)" But what goes in the blank? "generally", maybe, but given the above I'm not sure that "generally" applies anymore; "often" maybe. "Sometimes" doesn't work semantically. "If expressed numerically" would be most accurate IMO, but longer than "often". I've changed it to "if expressed numerically". I went with "(in fact one's batting average, if expressed numerically, would by convention be .000)". Herostratus (talk) 01:18, 12 May 2016 (UTC)

The player in the story walked every time except his last at bat of the season when he got a hit. Thus, he actually did finish the season batting 1000. I hit in one official at bat. 24.140.206.195 (talk) 04:01, 30 March 2024 (UTC)