ty cobb had the highest batting average in major league baseball history.
who had the highest batting average in major league baseball history?
ty cobb
set by ty cobb in 1928 after beginning his career in 1905. highlights of this record include; three .400 seasons, nine .380 seasons, and leading the league 11 times in batting average. cobb managed to hit .323 in his final season at age 41. the next-closest player is rogers hornsby who had a batting average of .358; hornsby's career straddled the dead-ball and live-ball eras, with most of it being in the live-ball era. there are only three players with a career average over .350, and the highest batting average among those who played their entire careers in the live-ball era is ted williams' .344. since 1928, there have been only 46 seasons in which a hitter reached .366 and only tony gwynn attained that mark at least four times, finishing with a career .338 batting average. the active player with the highest batting average is miguel cabrera at .317, fractionally above josé altuve.
list of major league baseball records considered unbreakable
in baseball, batting average (avg) is a measure of a batter's success rate in achieving a hit during an at bat. in major league baseball (mlb), it is calculated by dividing a player's hits by his at bats (ab). in mlb, a player in each league wins the "batting title" each season for having the highest batting average that year. the american league (al) winner is known as the "rod carew american league batting champion", while the national league (nl) leader is designated the "tony gwynn national league batting champion". under current rules, a player must have 3.1 plate appearances (pa) per team game (for a total of 502 over the current 162-game season) to qualify for the batting title. however, if a player's lead in avg is sufficiently large that enough hitless at bats can be added to reach this requirement and the player still would have the highest batting average, he wins the title. tony gwynn, for example, had 159 hits in 451 abs in 1996 (.353 average) but only 498 pas. gwynn's batting average would have dropped to .349 (159 hits in 455 abs) with four hitless abs added to reach the 502 pa requirement, but this would still have been higher than the next-highest eligible player (.344 average), so he was awarded the 1996 nl batting title.
list of major league baseball batting champions