Mlb what is slugging percentage

Career Leaders for Slugging Average Not just great hitters, these are great sluggers. Where what happened yesterday is being preserved today.

Giancarlo Stanton. Paul Goldschmidt. Josh Donaldson. Ryan Zimmerman. Salvador Perez. Yasmani Grandal. Starling Marte. Matt Carpenter. Jonathan Schoop. For most stats I will be using Fangraphs.

I will occasionally use Baseball-Reference. My hope is that we all become more knowledgeable along the way. This post will look at batting average and slugging percentage.

Batting Average BA is calculated by dividing the number of hits a player gets by the number of his at bats. It is a simple and straightforward statistic, but it has flaws.

The biggest problem with BA is that it measures only the quantity of hits and not the quality. A swinging bunt infield single counts the same as a home run. This is important in the sense that the ultimate goal of baseball is to score runs and by the end of 9 innings score more runs than your opponent.

Therefore the quality of a hit counts more in that regard than the quantity. Over time, a player who hits home runs is going to generate more runs than a player who hits singles. Slugging Percentage SLG , unlike batting average, measures the quality of hits. Slugging percentage is calculated by dividing the total number of bases by the number of at bats.

A single is 1 base, a double is 2 bases, and so on. SLG tells you what BA does not, that is, the type of hits, not just the number. In , Carlos Beltran had a BA of. Over their entire careers, Beltran has a BA of. The difference in these two statistics in this example demonstrates why BA alone does not give a complete picture of the offensive skills of any given hitter. BA does not differentiate between a power hitting outfielder and a singles hitting utility player.

That difference is significant in terms of how many runs that player can generate, which is the difference between winning and losing. The term slugging percentage is a misnomer , for it is actually a weighted average , not a percentage. He had at bats, so his total number of bases divided by his total at-bats is.

The next year he slugged. Babe Ruth led the league 13 times , except - the most times which any batter of pitcher led the league in any major category. Long after it was first invented, the slugging percentage gained new significance when baseball analysts realized that it combined with on-base percentage OBP to form a very good measure of a player's overall production. A predecessor metric was developed by Branch Rickey in Rickey, in Life Magazine , suggested that combining OBP with what he called "extra base power" would give a better indicator of player performance than typical Triple Crown stats.