Sports

Baseball’s Mr. Average is a future First Ballot Hall of Famer

There is no official award in the sport of baseball, but if it does, the plaque should be presented in honor of Pat Meares. He spent his nine-year career as a regular shortstop for the Minnesota Twins and later the Pittsburgh Pirates, an unremarkable but fairly adequate infielder who was exactly average.

At no point was this more true than in 1997, when Meares’ top offensive stats exactly matched the stats of the average player in baseball. He hit .276, which was the exact overall batting average in both leagues combined, as well as the ten home runs Meares amassed that season.

Those numbers would be far from average for the player who would win the Pat Meares award at this point in the season, as his .276 mark is more than twenty points higher than the current overall batting average. On the other hand, his ten home runs would be significantly lower than the league average, which is on track to hit nearly twenty.

In 2018 so far, players have a team batting average of .247 in the American League and just .244 on the Senior Circuit, alarmingly low numbers compared to the decade in which Meares played. In fact, no team has a batting average as high as Meares in 1997, and the league-leading Boston Red Sox (.265) outscore him by more than ten points. Surprisingly, four clubs have team averages below .230, touched by the .220 overall average of the Arizona Diamondbacks.

While no one is exactly the same as the Average Mr. Meares three decades ago, one guy in the American League comes close. Oh, and it turns out that he’s not only a perennial All-Star, but also a future Hall of Famer in Cooperstown.

With a .247 batting average, Albert Pujols is hitting at the precise percentage of the typical player. The eight explosions Pujols has made this year are just half a percentage point more than the average American League player.

Several guys in the National League are hitting .244, the exact overall average so far in 2018. Third baseman Evan Longoria of the San Francisco Giants is one of them, but his ten home runs have put him three above average. The other .244 hitter is Atlanta Braves outfielder Ender Inciarte, who nevertheless is three home runs behind the NL average.

Trey Mancini, an outfielder for the Orioles, is hitting at the exact average, not the league he plays in, but the team he belongs to. His .228 batting average is the same mark Baltimore is batting overall, tied with the Texas Rangers for the lowest spot in the American League.

There is an equivalent to Mancini in the other league, a player whose batting average is exactly the same as his team’s overall record. Pittsburgh shortstop Jordy Mercer started the day at .255, which is also the Pirates’ collective average as a club.

Meares patrolled the Pittsburgh midfield 15 years before Mercer, but the game they are a part of has changed dramatically. A guy who scored twenty points above the league average today never made an All Star team or made the playoffs, and that season Meares earned $ 225.00 for being “Mr. Average.”

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