Since quite a few of the readers are either new to baseball or casual fans I'm going to try to make quite a few posts covering basic stuff, right down to glossaries and abbreviations for the baseball virgins.
Most of that can wait until I complete the NL previews but since (in the interests of brevity) I've referred a fair bit to players in terms of their relation to the average I figured it might be a good idea to give a general idea of what average is in MLB terms.
As the title gives away, this should be the first of a number of posts looking at the concept of average (and the related concept of replacement) players and is going to start very simplistically.
I'm only looking at hitting and pitching and using the bare bones "media-friendly" statistics.
For hitting I'll list extended batting lines in the form: Batting average/On-base percentage/Slugging percentage/OPS
(For the rookie readers these will get explained a bit later, but suffice to say the bigger the better
- lines like this are fairly commonplace, usually omitting the fourth which is simply On base added to Slugging)
For pitching it's ERA (the lower the better in this case).
These aren't necessarily the best stats for evaluation (the pitching ones are downright lousy at it) but for now I'll put them out for the sake of accessibility. Later posts will look at more useful evaluation tools.
First off, the overall Major league averages (all figures are from 2007 season):
Hitting: .268/.336/.423/.758
Pitching: 4.47
There's a small difference between the leagues, however, in large part due to the DH rule in the AL so:
AL Hitting: .271/.338/.423/.761
NL Hitting: .266/.334/.423/.757
AL Pitching: 4.52
NL Pitching: 4.44
The bigger differences, however, are between positions.
Obviously, some positions are tougher to play defensively so less players are able to do so. The toughest defensive positions have the smallest pool of players and therefore the weakest average hitting level.
So, broken down by league and position the averages look like:
AL C: .254 /.318/.395/.713
AL 1B: .267/.348/.443/.790
AL 2B: .284 /.339/.416/.755
AL 3B: .266/.334/.427/.761
AL SS: .269/.322/.391/.713
AL LF: .275/.335/.426/.760
AL CF: .272/.340/.414/.754
AL RF: .288/.359/.465/.824
AL DH: .268/.355/.447/.802
NL C: .257/.318/.394/.712
NL 1B: .284/.365/.481/.846
NL 2B: .272/.341/.418/.759
NL 3B: .280/.348/.456/.805
NL SS: .279/.337/.420/.758
NL LF: .278/.358/.478/.835
NL CF: .273/.336/.426/.762
NL RF: .275/.344/.442/.786
NL DH*: .274/.343/.444/.787
(*small sample size caveat applies since they only occur in road interleague games; also I've not bothered listing pitchers hitting abilities here since they're generally assumed to be next to non-existent - not true, but that's for another time)
Similarly, starting pitchers differ from relievers both in their ability to last more innings and (for many other reasons) the expected results level:
AL Starting Pitchers: 4.61
AL Relief Pitchers: 4.33
NL Starting Pitchers: 4.64
NL Relief Pitchers: 4 .08
For now, I just wanted the numbers there to help provide a frame of reference to make a little more sense of what I mean when I refer to a player as average or above-average or whatever. Specifically the differences between average hitters at various positions.
In the next installment I'll go into this a bit further looking at league and positional differences. We'll also look at why Batting Average and ERA are poor evaluating tools and examine better ways of judging who is good and who isn't from the numbers side (predominantly).
Data for this post taken from baseball-reference.com
