Blue Jays' Lenyn Sosa has a higher on-base percentage than batting average this season
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Blue Jays' Lenyn Sosa has a higher on-base percentage than batting average this season originally appeared on The Sporting News. Add The Sporting News as a Preferred Source by clicking here.
Almost always, you'll see OBP as being higher than batting average.
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But once in a while, like with the Toronto Blue Jays' Lenyn Sosa, it can work in reverse. An on-base percentage can actually be lower than a hitter's average.
That's what Sosa is doing in the early going, both in his stats just with Toronto and also when combining with his early season numbers with the Chicago White Sox.
We'll use the combined numbers to take a look at this quirk.
Sosa has a .257 batting average through Saturday, May 2.
He has a .254 on-base percentage through the same time.
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The key here is that batting average is based on hits out of at bats, while on-base percentage factors in walks, hit by pitches and uses plate appearances instead of ABs.
The stats that can be game changers for this quirk are sacrifice bunts and sacrifice flies. Both of those count as plate appearances but not as at bats. And neither count as a hitter reaching base, so as far as OBP is concerned, they work as an 0-for-1, but for batting average, they're an 0-for-0.
This season, Sosa has 18 hits in 70 at bats. He has yet to draw a walk.
And he has one sac bunt and one sac fly.
So that works out to 18 times reaching base in 72 plate appearances.
That's how you get an OBP lower than a batting average.
If anything, this just says Sosa should probably think about working a walk every once in a while. None in 72 plate appearances is pretty jarring.
But at least for now, it meant he had a goofy set of numbers that were worth breaking down.