Batting Average for Dummies

Baseball at bat

While our staffers are out wandering around the internet looking for DotD nominees, it's pretty normal for them to find content that seems to be authoritative but actually is only correct(ish) in the surface. A surprising (not) amount of the content fitting that content seems to be written by people with journalism degrees; probably because so many didn't have a job in the field after the recession of 2008-9... That may well be why eHow.com's Joe Steel published his light-weight instructions for "How to Calculate a Batting Average" for SportsRec.com.

This one's an odd one: according to the website, Steel published this way back in 2000, although the Wayback Machine's oldest version (2004) is completely different. Adding to the confusion is that the current version and the newest eHow version, also credited to Steel, has an introduction referencing Bull Durham. The meat of the post remains the same, however... and that's where we found instructions that are pretty much skin-deep:

"Just divide the number of base hits the player gets by the number of times he's been at bat. For example, if a player has been at bat 520 times and has gotten 179 hits, his batting average is 179/520, or .344. Walks do not count as an at-bat, and neither do sacrifice flies or bunts or getting hit by a pitch."

That's correct... as far as it goes, which isn't quite as far as it actually should. You see, Steel didn't refer to the official rules, just to some stats pages at ESPN and similar fansites. Had he actually consulted the rules, Joe might have been a bit more accurate... or perhaps we should say, "More nearly complete." Steel missed the last section of the definition of an at bat, which says that a batter is not charged with an at bat if he or she reaches first base as a result of catcher interference.

More to the point, Steel missed out on a chance to mention those times a runner reaches base but is still charged with an at bat: a fielding error, a fielder's choice, and a dropped third strike.
We strive for completeness, our Dumbass of the Day apparently did not.

copyright © 2019-2021 scmrak

DD - BASEBALL