Enter a player's hits and at-bats to get their batting average instantly — no sign-up needed.
Batting average (AVG) is the share of a player's official at-bats that end in a base hit, written as a three-digit decimal such as .300. It is the oldest and most widely quoted hitting stat in baseball and softball, and it is usually the first number a parent learns to read on a stat sheet or a scoreboard graphic.
A .300 hitter gets a hit in 30 percent of their at-bats. Because walks, hit-by-pitches and sacrifices are not at-bats, batting average only tells you how often a player gets a hit when the at-bat actually counts against them. That is both its strength (it is simple to understand) and its weakness (it ignores walks entirely, which is why coaches also track on-base percentage).
Softball uses exactly the same definition. Fastpitch and slowpitch leagues both count hits and at-bats the same way, so this calculator works for either sport.
Batting average = Hits ÷ At-Bats
Hits are singles, doubles, triples and home runs — any time the batter reaches base safely on a ball put in play without an error or a fielder's choice being scored. Reaching base on an error is not a hit, even though the runner is standing on first.
At-bats are trickier than they sound. An at-bat is a plate appearance that ends in a hit, an out, a fielder's choice or an error. It is not a walk, a hit-by-pitch, a sacrifice bunt, a sacrifice fly or catcher's interference. If your scorebook only records plate appearances, subtract those before you divide, or the average will come out too low.
Averages are written to three decimal places with the leading zero dropped, and rounded normally: 11 ÷ 34 = 0.3235 becomes .324.
Say your player has played twelve games this spring. Adding up the scorebook gives 45 plate appearances, 8 walks, 2 hit-by-pitches and 1 sacrifice bunt. Their hits are 8 singles, 2 doubles and 1 triple.
Type 11 and 34 into the calculator above and you will see .324. If you had divided by the 45 plate appearances instead of the 34 at-bats you would have gotten .244 — a big difference for exactly the same season.
At the Major League level the answer is well established. Across the full 2025 regular season, MLB hitters batted .245 as a league (calculated from official MLB Stats API team totals; 2024 was .243). The rough tiers most fans use:
| Level | Batting average | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| MLB, 2025 league average | .245 | An ordinary big-league hitter |
| MLB, good regular | .270–.290 | Solidly above average |
| MLB, excellent season | .300+ | All-Star territory; only a handful of hitters get there each year |
| MLB, elite | .330+ | Batting-title contender |
| Youth (8U–14U) | Varies widely — judge the trend, not the number | Short games, uneven pitching and small samples make a single figure meaningless |
For youth and travel ball there is no honest benchmark, and you should be suspicious of anyone who gives you one. Averages at 10U are inflated by misplays that get scored as hits and by pitchers who cannot throw strikes; at 14U on a full-size field they drop sharply. A sample of 30 at-bats can swing 100 points on two lucky bloopers. Instead, compare three things: the player's average now against their average a month ago, this season against last season, and their place on the league's own leaderboard, where every player faces the same pitching and the same scorekeepers.
For a young player, batting average is a useful signal only when you log every game and watch the line move. A .180 in April that becomes .280 by June is a player whose swing and pitch selection are improving; a .350 built on four games is just noise. Batting average also hides the things young hitters get better at first — laying off bad pitches, working walks, hitting the ball hard at people — so pair it with OBP and slugging before drawing conclusions.
If you keep a book in the stands, the free printable scorecard and stat sheet give you columns for AB, H and the rest, so the math above is a thirty-second job after each game. MyBallPlayer does the same thing automatically and charts the average across the season, which is the view that actually tells you something.
Divide hits by official at-bats and round to three decimals. 11 hits in 34 at-bats is 11 ÷ 34 = .324. Walks, hit-by-pitches and sacrifices are not at-bats, so leave them out of the denominator.
In MLB, the 2025 league average was .245, .270 to .290 is a good regular and .300 is an excellent season. For youth players there is no reliable benchmark; compare the player against their own earlier games and the league leaderboard instead.
No. Walks are not at-bats, so they neither help nor hurt batting average — but they do count toward on-base percentage, which is why coaches look at both.
No. A reached-on-error is scored as an at-bat with no hit, so it lowers the batting average even though the runner is safe.
Softball uses the same formula and conventions. Because game length, field size and pitching quality vary so much between fastpitch, slowpitch and age groups, judge softball averages the way you judge youth baseball — by the trend across a season and the league leaderboard, not against an MLB or college number.
Yes — a hit in every at-bat gives a 1.000 average, which usually only happens over a game or two. A player with zero at-bats has no average at all, which is why this calculator shows nothing until at-bats are above zero.