Does batting .300 matter anymore? Trea Turner sure thinks it does. Why is it becoming increasingly rare?

First, Trea Turner got ahead in the count. Then, he got a fastball over the plate. And he did what good hitters do. He lashed it through the middle of the field for a base hit in the first inning Wednesday night.

Turner’s batting average at that instant: .300.

It shouldn’t have been that notable, especially considering the Phillies star shortstop won a batting title in 2021 and is a career .296 hitter in 10 major-league seasons. But here’s the thing: Nobody hits .300 anymore. Well, almost nobody.

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Ted Williams was baseball’s last .400 hitter, reaching that mark 83 years ago. Others came close. Rod Carew batted .388 in 1977; George Brett .390 in 1980; Tony Gwynn .394 in 1994. But nobody could actually get there, and as decades passed, .400 grew ever more mythical.

In the 2020s, .300 is starting to feel like the new .400.

Through Thursday, 134 players had enough plate appearances to qualify for the major-league lead in batting average. Eight — count ‘em, eight! — were hitting .300 or better, including two in the National League. If that holds, it will be the smallest group of .300 hitters since 1968, the infamous “Year of the Pitcher,” when the club consisted of six players.

It isn’t a one-off, either. From 2000 to 2009, an average of 39.7 hitters batted at least .300. There were 23 .300 hitters per season from 2010 to 2017, including 25 in both 2016 and 2017. In the last five full seasons (not counting 2020), beginning with 2018, the number fell to 16, 19, 14, 11, and nine last year.

Turner, who entered the weekend at .298, has a theory.

“Everything with baseball is money,” he said this week before a game against the Rays. “Whatever you pay players to do, that’s what they’re going to do. [Teams] value the strikeout, the walk, the homer. Wherever those dollars go, that’s what you get.”

It is true that in the analytics age, batting average isn’t viewed as an accurate measure of a hitter’s impact. It reflects how often a player reaches base via only a hit, whereas on-base percentage includes walks. OPS provides an even more complete picture because it encompasses on-base ability as well as hitting for power.

Good luck spotting a Phillies hitter’s batting average amid the alphabet soup of next-gen stats on Phanavision or the zillion other scoreboards at Citizens Bank Park. It’s up there somewhere, but it’s buried beneath an avalanche of wOBA, WRC+, xSLG, and, of course, exit velocity and launch angle, the sexiest numbers in the stathead community.

In the universe of baseball stats, batting average is as obsolete as the cassette tape.

But .300 does remain significant to players of a certain age, including 31-year-old Turner, who hit .342 as a rookie in 2016 with the Nationals, .335 in the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, and .328 to grab the NL batting crown in 2021.

For casual fans, batting average is easier to compute — and to digest. Everyone knows .300 as a standard of excellence for a hitter. But what’s the equivalent round number for OPS? Is it .800? .850? Higher? (League average is .712, by the way.)

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“I love it, personally,” Turner said of batting average as a relevant stat. “I always wanted to be a dangerous hitter, and for that, you have to hit homers and doubles and whatnot. But growing up, every good hitter hit .300.”

Surely, then, there are other explanations for the .300 hitter’s becoming an endangered species. In separate conversations this week, Turner and Phillies hitting coach Kevin Long shared their thoughts on why batting averages have come down across baseball and if there’s hope for a revival.

In 2007, when Chase Utley finished third in the NL with a .332 average, the collective mark among major-league hitters was .268. This season, it’s .244, tied for second-lowest since MLB lowered the mound after the 1968 season to help counter a .237 league average.

It isn’t that hitters have gotten worse. It’s that pitchers are nastier than ever.

Case in point: The average fastball velocity in 2007 was 91.1 mph, with 214 pitches clocked at 100 mph or faster. This season, it was 93.3 mph through Thursday, with 2,914 pitches at 100 mph or more, according to Statcast.

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And with the advent of PITCHf/x technology, pitchers are armed with more data, such as spin rate, horizontal break, and vertical drop. Coaches and analysts synthesize the information and help design optimal pitch shapes for starters, who aren’t expected to go as deep into games, and relievers with lightning in their arms.

“This day and age, the pitchers are all throwing hard,” Long said. “Stuff’s better. You have to cover a cutter, a sinker, a four-seamer, a slider, a curveball. It’s just better. And they’re more equipped to throw any pitch in any count. There’s no more fastball counts.”

Turner made a similar observation. He has seen a higher percentage of breaking pitches this season than ever in his career. For the first time since he debuted in 2015, fewer than half of the total pitches to him have been fastballs.

“I feel like, in the past, guys would be like, ‘Look for a heater, look for a heater, look for a heater,’ and then, two strikes, ‘All right, I’ll look for something else,’” Turner said. “You might go up there now and see seven pitches and see seven breaking balls. When I came up and I led off and I stole bases a lot, I’d get 3-1 heaters, 2-0 heaters. Now, I’m almost looking for a 2-0 slider, which is insane. It’s really weird.

“Pitchers are so good now. Scouting reports. It’s a lot going on.”

That’s especially true for the Phillies. The book on many of their hitters is that they will swing at breaking pitches out of the strike zone. Thus, they have seen a higher percentage of curveballs and sliders (33.6% through Thursday) of any team in baseball.

Long attributes Turner’s relative consistency — he has batted between .284 and .342 in seven of nine seasons since 2016 — to repeatable mechanics. He maintains that Turner could benefit from making better swing decisions, but given the quality of pitching, it’s easier said than done.

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On average, Turner chases 32.2% of pitches out of the zone. If he could reduce that rate to, say, 28%, and hit the ball to the right side of the field more often, .300 would be more easily attainable.

“But, again, you have to speed up because guys are throwing harder,” said Long, who has seen fewer hitters willing to work deep counts because they’re afraid to hit with two strikes. “You have to be more ready, and you have to hit the ball out in front more, so it means you’re more susceptible to off-speed, which means you’re probably not going to go the other way as well.”

No wonder Turner said it’s harder now to hit for average than even when he came to the majors in 2015.

Baseball tends to be cyclical. Pitchers adjust to favorable hitting trends, and hitters react accordingly. It may take years, but it usually happens. Surely, then, a time will come for the .300 hitter to rise again.

“I don’t know,” Long said. “I’ve just seen it get harder and harder. It just seems like .285 is really good now, maybe .290.”

MLB instituted sweeping rules changes before last season to help add more action to the game. But even with the pitch clock and a ban on extreme defensive shifts, the league-wide average ticked up only five points, from .243 in 2022 to .248. It’s back down to 2022 levels now.

To Turner, it comes back to industry-wide shifts in hitting philosophy.

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“I feel like older guys, kind of like myself — and Nick [Castellanos] is probably this way, too — we go up there to hit,” Turner said. “If we walk, that’s good. But we want to hit. I feel like now, some of these players coming up — and some are really good players — are thinking about that walk almost more than they are hitting. You know? That’s kind of where the game’s gone. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I just think that’s how it’s changed.

“For me, the hitting aspect is starting to come down a little bit, and it’s more of controlling the strike zone. You see how many teams pay people to walk and to see pitches and to do the things that we’re talking about. Organizations build their systems and their teams around that.”

Long, 57, has lived through that evolution. He batted .273 as a minor-league outfielder with the Royals from 1989 to 1996, getting as far as triple A. During his playing career, Gwynn and Wade Boggs were regarded among the preeminent hitters in the sport even though neither hit for power. Both were overwhelmingly elected to the Hall of Fame.

“Those guys had a lot of value back then,” Long said. “Not so much today.”

Look at Padres infielder Luis Arráez, the modern version of Gwynn and Boggs. He entered the weekend batting .317 and closing in on a third consecutive batting title because he puts the bat on the ball at an absurdly high rate and sprays the ball around the field. In 616 plate appearances through Thursday, he struck out only 26 times.

But Arráez doesn’t hit the ball out of the park. He has four homers this year and 28 in six major-league seasons. So, he’s making only $10.6 million after losing a salary arbitration case last winter. And the Padres gave up only one of their top-10 prospects to pry him from the Marlins in a trade in May.

“He’s not trying to impact the ball a great deal,” Long said. “That’s where [hitting .300] becomes a little different because he’s losing a lot of slug. And there’s not many players today that are willing to lose slug. I think guys want to hit .300 still. Guys that have been around a while, they still talk about that as the barometer. But they also know that averages are going down.

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“The guys that are amazing are the guys that have power and are doing it.”

And there aren’t many of those. Here’s the list of 30-homer/.300 hitters: Aaron Judge (Yankees), Marcell Ozuna (Braves), Yordan Alvarez (Astros), and Bobby Witt Jr. (Royals). Vladimir Guerrero Jr. (Blue Jays) is nearing 30 homers; Brent Rooker (A’s), Shohei Ohtani (Dodgers), and Juan Soto (Yankees) were batting .298, .292, and .289 through Thursday.

Bryce Harper isn’t far off. Despite a monthlong power drought, he was batting .288 and stuck on 26 homers entering the weekend. Turner drives the ball, too, although he has never reached the 30-homer mark.

If Turner finishes at .300, he will be the Phillies’ first hitter to reach that mark while qualifying for the batting title since Harper (.309) in 2021 and only the third since Utley and Aaron Rowand (.309) in 2007.

And as Turner sees it, hitting .300 remains not only a worthwhile goal but also has become a market inefficiency.

“There’s a reason only 10 guys hit .300 in a year. It’s really hard to do,” Turner said. “I look at it as, if everyone can hit 20 homers now, are the homers as valuable? It’s more like, where are the numbers lacking? And to me, that’s where they’re lacking.”