What Makes a .260 Hitter More Valuable Than a .300 Hitter?

What if the fastest way to win more games is to stop spending outs? We take a hard look at the numbers that truly drive runs—on-base percentage, slugging percentage, and the deceptively simple OPS—and show how a smarter lineup can flip close scores in your favor. From a striking Barry Bonds breakdown to a candid reflection on batting a high school star second for extra plate appearances, we lay out why batting average and RBIs often hide the real story and how to build an order that multiplies opportunities instead of wasting them.

We start by reframing offense around scarcity: every team owns a limited supply of outs, and the goal is to convert those into runs with ruthless efficiency. That’s where OBP becomes the north star, rewarding hitters who control the zone and keep innings alive. Layer in slugging to capture extra-base impact, then combine them into OPS to compare hitters cleanly. You’ll hear a simple head-to-head that exposes why a .265 hitter with a .900 OPS can outproduce a .300 hitter with a .760 OPS, especially when every plate appearance is magnified in seven-inning high school games.

From Moneyball’s 2002 A’s to the 2004 Red Sox and the Rays’ worst-to-first leap, the pattern holds: teams that get on base and hit for power score more and win more. We translate that into a clear blueprint for coaches—elevate your highest OBP bats to the top, stack reliable power behind them, and give your best OPS hitters the most turns. Then we balance the model with practical judgment: park factors, matchups, and game flow still matter, but they should refine, not replace, your default. Walk away with drills and culture shifts that reward plate discipline, punish bad swing decisions, and celebrate the unsexy walk as a winning play.

Ready to rebuild your card with purpose and pick up a few extra wins? Follow the show, share this episode with your staff, and leave a quick review telling us your team’s OPS thresholds for the top of the lineup.

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Chapters

• 0:01 A Better Way to Build Lineups
• 0:52 Show Intro and Host Credibility
• 1:32 Sponsor Message: Netting Professionals
• 2:43 Rethinking Traditional Stats
• 3:15 Case Study: Ty Harriet’s Role
• 4:16 Barry Bonds and the Value of OBP
• 6:51 Why Slugging Matters
• 7:29 OPS: The Simple, Powerful Metric
• 8:41 Comparing Players by OPS
• 9:41 Lineup Construction by OBP and OPS
• 11:20 Modern Examples and Adoption
• 12:37 Action Steps for Coaches
• 13:28 Balance Analytics and Gut
• 15:39 Closing and Weekly Schedule
• 15:46 Sponsor Reminder and Sign-off

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:01

What if I told you there's a better way to build your baseball lineup? Bill James, Moneyball, and Smart Baseball unlock secrets that turns good teams into great ones. When Barry Bonds walked 232 times in 2004, he was showing us something beautiful about offensive production that traditional stats just couldn't capture. In the next few minutes, I'm going to share the statistics that actually win baseball games, show you how to construct a lineup that maximize your team's potential and reveal why on-base percentage and slugging percentage are your keys to success. If you're ready to give your team the best possible chance to win, this is for you.

SPEAKER_00: 0:49

This is the Ultimate High School Baseball Coaching Podcast. Baseball Coaches Unplug, your go-to podcast for baseball coaching tips, drills, and player development strategies. From travel to high school and college. Unlock expert coaching advice grounded in real success stories, data-backed training methods, and mental performance tools to elevate your team. Tune in for bite-sized coaching wisdom, situational drills, team culture building, great stories and proven strategies that turn good players into great athletes. The only podcast that showcases the best coaches from across the country with your host, Coach Ken Carpenter.

SPEAKER_01: 1:32

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Check them out on X, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn for all their latest products and projects. You know, for about a hundred years, did we have it all wrong? Were we looking at the game through a foggy windshield, thinking we could see just fine? We'd built our lineups around batting average RBIs and something we called clutch hitting that we couldn't even define properly, and then some folks started asking uncomfortable questions. I look back on should I have done something different with my lineup when I had my best hitter in my coaching career? His name was Ty Harriet. His freshman year he hit 400 and had 15 home runs on the varsity. He led us in every offensive category. His senior year required a lot more patience. He was walked 38 times, 22 were intentional, and he still hit over 500. But he didn't lead us in RBI. The player that hit behind him did. That was Josh Hall, who had over 40 RBI that year. I hit Ty second in the lineup to get him one more at bat each game because in high school, you only play seven innings. Could I have done something more to get even more productivity out of him? Looking back, he was counting on our eight and nine hole hitters and our leadoff hitter as his chance to collect more RBI and help the team. As a coach, I always considered the most important stat for a team was run scored. Now let me take you back to Barry Bonds in 2004. That season, I don't want to talk about the controversy that comes with Barry Bonds, which there's plenty of that. I'm talking about the pure offensive production. Barry Bonds was walked 232 times. 232 times. The man got on base 376 times that season, and only 135 of them were hits. Think about that. If you were a traditional manager looking only at his 362 batting average, you'd say great player, hall of fame player, obviously. But you'd be missing that he reached base at a 609 clip. Six out of every 10 plate appearance appearances. He didn't make an out. That's not a player, that's a run-scoring machine. That's exactly what Bill James was trying to tell us all along. See, James understood something fundamental. Baseball is about collecting hits. It's not about making outs. Every team gets 27 outs per game. That's your currency. That's what you spend. The question isn't how many hits can you get? The question is how can you use those 27 outs to score more runs? This is where on-base percentage becomes your North Star. OBP tells you the truth about a hitter's job. Don't make outs. A walk is nearly as valuable as a single. Both put a runner on first and both keep the inning alive. Both give your team a chance to score without spending one of those precious 27 outs. I remember talking to a coach years ago who said he didn't focus, he didn't consider walks as valuable because you can't walk your way into winning a state championship. But here's the thing: you can. The 2002 Oakland Athletics that Michael Lewis wrote about in Moneyball, they won 20 games in a row. Not because they had the best athletes or the highest batting averages. They won because Billy Bean and Paul Paul DiPodesta built a lineup that understood that getting on basion on base was the foundation of everything. Now let's talk about sledding percentage and why it matters. Keith Law puts it beautifully in smart base in the book Smart Baseball. When he discusses the value of extra bases, a single is good, a double is better, home run obviously is the best. Slugging percentage tells you about a hitting's power, the ability to move runners, their capacity to change the game with one swing. But here's where it gets interesting. And it's straight out of James' philosophy. Neither OBP nor slugging tells the complete story alone. You can have a guy who walks a ton but has no power. He's valuable but limited. You can have a guy who hits for power but strikes out a lot and never walks. He's exciting but inefficient. What you want is OPS on base plus slugging. This is your offensive Swiss Army knife, if you will. It combines the two most important things a hitter can do: get on base and hit for power. When James started popularizing the concept, people thought it was too simple, too reductive. And how could you add two percentages together? But the beauty is in the simplicity, an 850 OPS player is producing at an elite level, period. They're getting on base, they're driving the ball, they're doing exactly what you need to score runs. And scoring runs, last time I checked, is how you win baseball games. Let me tell you about a comparison that drives this home. Let's say you got two players and you're building a lineup for a crucial game. Player A hits 300 with an on-base percentage of 340 and he's slugging at a 420 clip. Traditional numbers say he's a 300 hitter, solid, right? Player B hits 265 with an OBP of 390 in slugging at 510. Old school guys might say player A is better because of the batting average, but player B has an OPS of 900. Player A, his OPS is 760. Player B is getting on base 50% 50 points more often, and that's huge. And he's slugging 90 points higher. He's creating more runs, creating more opportunities, and giving your team a better chance to win every single game. This isn't theoretical. James proved it with decades of data analysis. The teams that lead an OPS almost always lead and run score. And the teams that scored the most runs won the most games. It's not complicated. We just pretend it was because we were in love with the wrong numbers. Let's talk about the lineup construction. Because this is where it all comes together. For generations, managers slash high school coaches, college coaches put their table setters at the top. Guys who hit for average could bunt, could manufacture runs. Then you'd put your power guys in the middle. The problem? Your best hitters don't bat as often as your leadoff guy. That's mathematically backwards. What James and later Moneyball taught us is you want your best OPS guys, the ones who get on base the most consistently hitting in front of your power. You want to maximize plate appearances for your best hitter. If Barry Bonds in his prime is your cleanup hitter, you want three guys in front of him who have high on base percentages. So Barry comes up with runners on base as often as possible. Think about it. A 400 OBP guy leading off means he's on base for your power hitters 40% of the time. That's 40% more opportunities for extra base hits to drive in runs. It's not rocket science, it's just math that we refuse to do. Keith Law makes a critical point in smart baseball about why we resisted the revolution for so long. We loved the wrong stats because we were simple and because they had always been there. Batting average was invented in 1870s. We were using Civil War era statistics to evaluate modern baseball. RBIs. Don't even get me started. RBI tells you more about where you hit in the lineup and who's batting in front of you than about actual ability. A great hitter batting eighth won't have as many RBI opportunity as a mediocre hitter batting fourth behind three high on-base percentage guys, and he'll have RBI falling in his lap. So here's what you can do as a coach or as a manager, as someone who actually wants to win games. You build your lineup around on-base percentage first. You identify the guys who don't make outs. You find the hitters who understand the strike zone, who take their walks, who make the pitcher work. Then you look at the power, their slugging percentage, their ability to hit for extra bases. You combine those numbers into OPS, and that's your hierarchy. Your best OPS guys hit in the most important spots. Your highest on-base percentage guys hit at the top because they get the most plate appearances. You can stop caring about batting average except as a component of the on-base percentage. You stop caring about RBIs except as a byproduct of a smart lineup construction. Because here's the truth that James Lewis and Law and everyone else who studied the game scientifically discover baseball rewards teams that get on base and hit for power. Everything else is nostalgia and stubbornness. In 2004, the Boston Red Sox won the World Series using these principles. In 2008, the Tampa Bay's Rays went from worst to first embracing them. Teams across baseball now have analytic departments built on this foundation. Barry Bonds understood this better than most anyone. He knew his job wasn't to hit 300 or drive in runs. His job was to get on base and hit the ball hard. And when he did that at historic levels, his team won. When teams pitched around him because they feared that power, he took his walks and got on base anyway. He couldn't lose. That's what these statistics tell us how to win. Not how to look good and how to satisfy the old school in you, but how to actually score more runs than the other team. And that's all that matters. That's the only thing that's ever mattered. Coaches, as an experiment, go back and look at last season's statistics. Review your lineup and see if you change how you made your lineup the majority of the time. You might find a few more wins. So going into next season, go build your lineup on both OBP and slugging. Trust the numbers, trust the revolution, and win some ball games. Now, don't get me wrong, I still believe in the old school mentality of coaches trusting their gut. So don't rely totally on analytics. As a coach, there's so much to being successful in the game of baseball. But please consider all of these when you're coaching. Be sure to tune in every Wednesday for a new episode with some of the greatest baseball coaches from across the country. Today's podcast is powered by the netting professionals, improving programs one facility at a time. Contact them today at 844-620-2707. That's 844-620-2707. As always, I'm your host, Coach Ken Carpenter. Thanks for listening to Baseball Coaches Unplugged.