This headline gets your attention if you like statistics. It makes no sense without the context: See Baseball Reference’s report on batting average (BA) by year. In 2000 MLB batters averaged .270 (expressed as “two seventy”), but after years of decline they bottomed out at .245 (two forty-five) or so. This reflects a more analytical approach to hitting that disrespects batting average as a metric, it being likened to counting the number of bills in your wallet but not amount of money.

Nowadays MLB teams value players who excel at on-base-plus-slugging (OPS). This mashup of stats creates percentages over well over 100 (“one thousand” in baseball terms) for the utmost elite players—in 2025 only Aaron Judge of the New York Yankees and Shohei Ohtani of the Los Angeles Dodgers. MLB adopted OPS in 1984 after Pete Palmer introduced it in the pioneering book (co-authored by John Thorn) The Hidden Game of Baseball, A Revolutionary Approach to Baseball and Statistics.

OPS combines simplicity with reasonable accuracy and I think that is why it is popular.

– Jim Thorn, Why OPS Works, Fall 2019 Baseball Research Journal, Society for American Baseball Research (SABR)

I’ve been a fan of baseball since 1961 when the Washington Senators moved to the Twin Cities to become the Minnesota Twins. I was 8 years old then. My grandpa had been following the Minneapolis Millers since the late 19^th century as a young boy. He turned 8 in 1896 when his home team won their first Western League pennant.

Grandpa was an accountant, so, naturally he collected statistics on every Twins game—carefully ruling out rows and columns for the 9 batters and 9 innings and noting each players batting average. Because of that I am a holdout for appreciating players with high batting averages. I would rather see more hits and the strikeouts that come along with trying to hit a home run at every at bat.

On the other hand, I do not doubt that a lot of people will tune in tonight for Game 1 of the World Series to see if Shohei Ohtani lives up to his “Shotime” nickname by blasting at least one home run, if not several as he did in Game 4 of the National League Championship Series. American League fans like me will be rooting for George Springer (3^rd in MLB for 2025 OPS at .959) of the Toronto Blue Jays to hit another dramatic home run like he did for in Game 7 of the AL Championship Series.

Baseball is the greatest game!