Jose Reyes and His Meaningless Batting Title

Before last night turned into the most exciting night in regular season baseball history, the story of the day was Jose Reyes battling Ryan Braun for the National League batting title. As you probably know, Reyes dropped down a bunt in the 1^st inning of his game against the Reds to raise his batting average to .337, leaving him .003 points ahead of Braun, who had a .334 average going into his game. Wanting to protect this lead, Reyes then checked himself out of the game. Braun still had a chance to win the batting title if he had rattled off 3 or 4 hits in his game, but alas, he went 0-4, finishing the season with a .332 average and 2^nd place to Reyes. 

Now I’m not going to judge Reyes for doing this. Whether or not you feel what he did was wrong and “disgraceful to the game” is a matter of opinion and I personally don’t think it’s worth debating the merits of it. For all I know he has an incentive in his contract that guarantees him more money for winning a battle title. In which case more power to him. But what I am here to argue is that making a big deal about winning the batting title is completely pointless.

Batting average is one of the three classic hitter’s baseball stats that people still celebrate, along with home runs and RBIs. Over the last decade or so (the Moneyball era, if you will), a lot of baseball fans (re: nerds) have enjoyed watching baseball stats evolve. Being a baseball nerd and a Moneyball reader (and A’s fan), I have loved this. Websites like Fangraphs.com and BaseballReference.com have made these stats readily available for anyone to see. No longer are they locked away in a spiral bound Bill James notebook somewhere. Any national writer or everyday fan can look up and see what any players OBP, wOBA, WAR, or WPA is at anytime. While no baseball stat is perfect, using some of these advanced stats can help paint a better picture of a player than using just batting average.

Back to Reyes. He became the first ever Mets player to win the batting title yesterday. He also set his career high in batting average, as well as in a few other statistical categories. He had a very solid season and is surely going to cash in on a nice free agent contract this winter. So why am I saying that him winning the batting title is pointless? Because at the end of the day, the man he beat to win the batting title by .005 percentage points had the far superior season. And really, it’s not even close.

We can prove this just by looking at their most basic baseball stats for the season:

Reyes: .337 batting average/7 HRs/101 runs/44 RBIs/31 doubles/16 triples

Braun: .332 batting average/33 HRs/109 runs/111 RBIs/38 doubles/6 triples

For the average baseball fan, these numbers show a lot. Clearly Braun is more of a power hitter and Reyes is more of a speedy guy, but we already knew that. Therefore Reyes having 10 more triples is a surprise to no one. Reyes hits lead off and Braun hits in the middle of the order, so of course Braun is going to have more RBIs.  But just looking at these basic numbers, pretty much anyone would say that Braun had the better year. However, like I established earlier, I’m a nerd, so these numbers don’t satisfy me. Let’s dig a little deeper:

Reyes: .384 OBP/.494 SLG/.877 OPS/143 OPS+/5.8 WAR

Braun: .397 OBP/.597 SLG/.994 OPS/166 OPS+/7.7 WAR

Just a quick breakdown of the stats: OBP is on base percentage, SLG is slugging percentage, OPS is just OBP + SLG, OPS + adjusts your OPS against league average and ball park factors (your OPS+ will be higher if you put up good numbers in Oakland or SF, notorious pitchers parks than say Texas or Boston, which are more hitter friendly) and WAR is Wins Above Replacement, or how many more wins does a player add to a team vs. a replacement/minor league player.

As you can clearly see, Braun is superior in every category. He gets on base more (another way of saying this is he makes less outs than Reyes), he hits for more power (so he generates more runs) and he provides better overall value to his team. WAR even factors in defense and base running. In fact, Braun was as good as a base stealer as Reyes was this year. Braun stole 33 bases on 39 attempts and Reyes stole 39 bases on 46 attempts, both right at an 85% success rate.

Now I’m not writing this to bash Reyes, because like I mentioned earlier, he had a very good year. If we’re just going off WAR, you could say that only 4 players in the National League had a better year than him. But the fact remains that because he won the batting title, there are people out there that are going to argue that he had a better season than Braun, which is just plain not true. And, more importantly, people have been making a big deal all day about what Reyes did to win the batting title. Guess what? At the end of the season it’s just him leading the NL in one statistical category. Baseball old timers have romanticized batting average as the do all, end all stat when it comes to saying who the best hitter is. As I’ve just proven, Reyes is not the best hitter in the NL. I should point out here too that I’m also not writing this to praise Braun. In fact, I will be furious when inevitably some writers vote him for NL MVP over Matt Kemp, who finished the season with a 10.0 WAR.

Baseball’s obsession with batting average needs to stop. It’s a fine stat, no doubt, but it’s a comfort stat. It’s something we all grew up knowing as young baseball fans and players, we all know the difference in meaning between a .300 hitter and a .250 hitter, and we all know that Ted Williams was the last player to bat .400. That’s fine. In today’s era, however, we have so many more sophisticated stats (I say sophisticated yet OBP is a lot easier to calculate than batting average) that can help us understand baseball players better. To get all riled up over batting average is just pointless. So I guess my final message to baseball fans, writers, or whoever still thinks the batting title is this grand, glorious thing is: Grow up.