Batting title

The Batting title is the name usually given to the feat of a batter leading his league in batting average. For decades, winning the batting title was considered the highest feat that a hitter could accomplish, although the feat lost a lot of its luster since the 1980s as a result of the development of sabermetrics, which have downgraded the importance of batting average as a statistic. Whereas batting champions were known by every baseball fan until that time, the batting champ is now a mere curiosity, as most analysts attach more importance to on-base percentage and OPS, or to all-encompassing categories sur as WAR, as measures of a hitter's overall quality.

At the 2016 All-Star Game, Commissioner Rob Manfred announced that henceforth, the National League batting title would be known as the "Tony Gwynn Award", in honor of Tony Gwynn, while the American League title would be called the "Rod Carew Award", in honor of Rod Carew. Both Hall of Famers had won multiple batting titles in their day.

Also see

Batting Champs

Further Reading

• David L. Fleitz: Silver Bats and Automobiles: The Hotly Competitive, Sometimes Ignoble Pursuit of the Major League Batting Championship, McFarland, Jefferson, NC, 2011. ISBN 978-0-7864-5879-0
• Alyson Footer: "NL, AL batting titles named after Gwynn, Carew", mlb.com, July 13, 2016. [1]
• Rick Huhn: The Chalmers Race: Ty Cobb, Napoleon Lajoie, and the Controversial 1910 Batting Title That Became a National Obsession, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, NE, 2014. ISBN 978-0-8032-7182-1
• Herm Krabbenhoft: "Impact of the Varying Sac-Fly Rules on Batting Champs, 1931-2019", Baseball Research Journal, SABR, Volume 50, Number 2 (Fall 2021), pp. 59-64.

Related Sites

• Batting Champions by year at Baseball reference