I read the first couple paragraphs, then stopped. Here's the problem with this entire point. And don't get me wrong, I've been getting more into using sabermetrics the past couple of years. But the argument here is batting average as evaluating a team. WTF? Batting average is an individual stat. I've personally always ignored it when someone says a team is batting "suchandsuch" for exactly the reasons pointed out. But I don't know how you can possibly argue that, for evaluating an individual player, their batting average is a joke. There might be better, more advanced stats, but batting average for an individual is still a valid evaluation of that player in my opinion. For evaluating a team, it's useless. The player gets on base, their job is done. If the guy batting after him on the team then strikes out, and only gets a hit the next time up when the bases are empty, well, that shows how useless evaluating BA for a team is. But for an individual, if he gets a hit, he did his job. Period. Without going into sabermetrics, perhaps BA with RISP wouldn't be as absurdly useless for evaluating a team as BA. It's still awfully hard to evaluate a team's performance using an individual statistic.