The lost art of MLB hitting for average
The National League had just one .300 hitter this season.
By Frederic J. Frommer
This year, baseball witnessed a veritable bonanza of 50-home run seasons, two in each league. But when it comes to batting average, the National League is in an ice age.
Trea Turner of the Philadelphia Phillies won the 2025 league batting title with a .304 average—the lowest of any NL batting champ in history. He was the only NL player to (barely) exceed .300, the traditional mark of hitting excellence. Not only that, but the top 10 NL hitters also included four players batting in the .280s.
The paltry averages are rivaling those of 1968, a season so devoid of offense that it was known as The Year of the Pitcher. That season, Carl Yastrzemski of the Boston Red Sox won the American League batting title with a .301 average, the lowest winner in the history of either league, and was the sole AL player to hit over .300. In fact, he was the only batter in the league to top .290. In the NL, St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Bob Gibson had one of the best seasons in history, with a 1.12 ERA and 13 shutouts.
That year was emblematic of how far offense had eroded over the past generation. In 1941, when Ted Williams became the last player to hit over .400, he famously went 6-for-8 in a season-ending doubleheader to finish at .406. Yastrzemski, who replaced Williams in left field for Boston, went 0-for-5 in the 1968 season finale, nearly sending his average below .300.
After ’68, baseball took deliberate steps in to overcome batters’ uphill battle against dominant pitchers like Gibson and Denny McLain (31 wins). It lowered the pitcher’s mound and shrank the strike zone the next season. In 1973, the AL added the designated hitter to further stimulate offense.
Things are not nearly as dire this time around. Batting average is only one barometer to measure offensive success. By other metrics, hitters are on much firmer ground.
John Thorn, the official historian of Major League Baseball and a pioneer in the use of advanced statistics, notes that “batting average is an imperfect measure for the modern game.” As teams have increasingly prioritized power, they’ve relied more on stats like OPS—on-base percentage plus slugging—to evaluate performance.
So, though the batting average across MLB was just .245 this year—compared with a worst-ever .237 in 1968—the league-wide OPS is a more respectable .719. That’s a big jump from 1968, when the average OPS was .639.
ESPN Senior MLB Insider Jeff Passan argues that hitters are better than ever today, considering the kinds of challenging stuff that pitchers throw at them.
“The imperative of a hitter today, though, is entirely different than it was more than half a century ago,” he says. “Hitters are taught to chase extra-base hits, not batting average. And so while batting average remains a highly relevant statistic in the minds of fans, its de-prioritization by teams has bred a generation of hitters more concerned with on-base and slugging percentage.”
And despite the low-wattage NL batting race, there have been many impressive offensive performances this year. Aaron Judge, for example, topped the AL with a .331 average, the kind of number that fans are accustomed to seeing from a batting title champion—along with 53 homers and a league-best 1.145 OPS.
One of the best stories of the year is Seattle catcher Cal Raleigh becoming just the seventh player in history to hit 60 homers in a season—and the first switch-hitter to do it.
In the NL, Phillies slugger Kyle Schwarber belted 56 homers, and Los Angeles Dodgers superstar Shohei Ohtani was just a tick behind at 55. In his first season as a New York Met, Juan Soto became just the third player in MLB history with at least 40 homers, 100 RBIs, 100 walks, 100 runs, and 30 steals, joining Barry Bonds and Jeff Bagwell, each of whom did it twice in the 1990s.
Still, hitters faced tough headwinds this season, with pitchers throwing harder and spinning the ball more effectively, and teams using an arsenal of tough relievers and data-driven defensive alignments to stifle offense.
Pittsburgh Pirates flamethrower Paul Skenes, in just his second season, posted a 1.97 ERA while holding batters to a .199 batting average. He is the odds-on favorite to win the National League Cy Young Award. In the AL, Boston Red Sox pitcher Garrett Crochet won 18 games (another old-school stat) with a 2.59 ERA, and Detroit Tigers ace Tarik Skubal led the league with a 2.21 ERA.
Facing pitchers like that, it’s no wonder there was only one NL batter who hit over .300 this year, and just six in the American League.
Though it’s true that batting average has lost some of its luster compared with stats like OPS (and more sophisticated measurements like isolated power), it continues to hold a pull on baseball. Averages like .406 (Williams in 1941), .388 (Rod Carew in 1977) and .390 (George Brett in 1980) remain etched in the minds of millions of fans.
After all, no one ever talks about a player winning an OPS title.
Frederic J. Frommer, a writer and sports and politics historian, has written for the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Atlantic, History.com and other national publications. A former Associated Press reporter, Frommer is the author of several books, including “You Gotta Have Heart: Washington Baseball from Walter Johnson to the 2019 World Series Champion Nationals.” Follow him on X.
I appreciate this big picture in the context of years past. I was just wondering why I wasn't seeing batting averages in the .300s.
Next, please give us a preview of what the impact of robo-umpiring will bring. My love of baseball and loyalty as a fan hinges on whether I can stand that or not. Baseball games are long, with action that ebbs and flows. This is why so many traditions--how umps call plays, how batters respond to a great hit, what fans dream up to do in the stands--are so important to major-league games. They make them eminently watchable, even when action flags. I do not want to see human error fade from the game's many facets. Accepting mistakes--and accepting that the law of averages will level the playing field--keeps us humble and keeps the game human.
People always accuse Yankee fans of being myopic and always overvaluing their tradition and media coverage. The other side of the story is how baseball pundits and purists go out of their way not to give credit even when it is due. This story is about batting averages and how they have fallen, with Trea Turner leading the National League with a paltry .304. It gets around to mentioning Aaron Judge after 11 paragraphs to note that he topped the AL at .331 “the kind of number fans are accustomed to seeing from a batting title champion.” No mention of the fact that this accustomed number led the major leagues by more than 20 points or that accompanying a batting title with 50+ HRs had been accomplished only twice before, by Mickey Mantle and Jimmy Foxx. Given what the article is saying about the dominance of pitching, it would have been worth a sentence to note that in that context Judge had put together back-to-back seasons as good as any right-handed hitter in history. The real burn, however, is saved for pitching, where we are told that “In the AL, Boston Red Sox pitcher Garrett Crochet won 18 games (another old-school stat) with a 2.59 ERA and Detroit Tigers ace Tarik Skubal led the league with a 2.21 ERA.” Great years, but Max Fried won 19 games (also with just 5 loses) with an ERA of 2.86 and a lower WHIP than Crochet. Always fun to hate the Yankees, but we often have good reasons to gripe.