Originally Posted by
AtomicDumpling
Here is an interesting scenario:
Imagine that baseball had not been invented until the year 2000, well into the information age of computers. Now that there is so much data available about every game and so much processing power at our fingertips, do you think that Batting Average would ever have been invented as a statistic?
Batting average is basically a relic from the 1800's that became popular before records were kept on things like walks, errors and HBPs, and before extra base hits became common.
The flaws in battting average are so readily apparent by today's standards that I don't think batting average would ever have become popular if baseball had been invented in the modern world.