Bobby Witt Jr. had a good year at the plate, winning the AL batting crown with a .331 average. But exactly how good was it?
As I’ve discussed in previous posts, one can’t answer this sort of question based solely on the raw value of a metric like batting average or OPS or whathaveyou. The reason is that extraneous variability, in the form of fluctuating means and standard deviations unrelated to hitting proficiency, makes those measures non-comparable across seasons.
A simple and valid way to restore comparability is standardization: one transforms the measure in question—here, a player’s batting average—into a so-called z-score, which reflects how many standard deviations it is from the mean for that season. This puts the measure (again, batting average in this case) onto a season-invariant scale that reflects how well a player performed relative to the average or mean player in the season in which that mark was achieved.
In a previous post, I standardized the batting averages of all the AL/NL batting champions from 1900 to 2023 and arrayed them on a normalized scale with a mean of 100. I called the resulting scores hitters’ “BA+.” George Brett had the highest all-time BA+—that is, the highest all-time AL/NL batting average after standardization: 201, for his .390 BA in 1980.
This technique helps dispel the attractive but misguided (romanticized, really) view that “.400” is some magic plateau achieved by timeless baseball gods whose skills transcend those of the mere mortals who toil year in and year out to accumulate substantially lower league-leading averages. Some of those .400 hitters—like Ted Williams, whose .406 in 1941 is nearly indistinguishable from Brett’s mark—really did achieve levels of one-season hitting dominance so substantial that they ought to be held out as remarkable athletic feats. But others, like Bill Terry, whose .401 BA in 1930 equates to a middle-of-the-pack BA+ 161, were merely workmanlike.
On this scale, Witt Jr.’s season was pretty decent. His BA+ 172 ranks 61st all-time among AL/NL batting champions—out of 247, so about the 75% percentile.
It is necessarily a more impressive achievement than Terry’s 1930 .401. And it is also better than Rogers Hornsby’s .403 BA in 1925, a BA+ 168, which ranks 78th all time.
But Witt’s performance isn’t by any means the best, say, in this century. Excluding Barry Bonds (as should always be done, since his arcade-game-like performances drain all the meaning from inquiries like this), the best 21st Century performance belongs to Luis Arráez for his .354 BA/186 BA+ in 2023, which is the 19th all-time highest standardized BA for an AL/NL batting champ (his .316 NL-leading mark this year was much less impressive: BA+ 153, 187th all time). Ichiro (BA .372/BA+ 182, 2004), Josh Hamilton (.359/181), Chipper Jones (.364/178), Mookie Betts (.346/175, 2018), Albert Pujols (.359/173) and Todd Helton (.372/173) also rank higher than Witt Jr.
So make of that what you will. Obviously, Witt Jr.’s performance ranks significantly above average in the class of batting champion marks. It was also very good for the 21st century, if not cream of the crop.
It also happens to be better than some .400-hitter seasons, historically. But fully 67 of the batting champions who batted below .400 can say the same, so that’s probably not that big a deal.
I’ve added a 2024 patch and updated the standardized-batting average script in the data section so you can perform your own investigations.