List of Major League Baseball Batting Champions - Footnotes

Footnotes

• L Recognized "major leagues" include the current American and National Leagues and several defunct leagues – the American Association, the Federal League, the Players' League, and the Union Association.
• 1902a 1902b Sources differ as to whether Nap Lajoie or Ed Delahanty won the American League batting title in 1902 and differ slightly over Lajoie's precise statistics that season. The Hall of Fame credits Lajoie with 129 hits in 352 at bats (.368) while MLB and Baseball-Reference show 133 hits in 352 at bats (.378). According to Baseball-Reference a player qualified for a batting title prior to 1920 by appearing in 60% of his team's games—82 games in the 136 game schedule in 1902—and Lajoie appeared in 87 team games. As such, Baseball-Reference credits Lajoie with the 1902 title, with Delahanty's .376 batting average placing second. MLB's historical statistics leaderboards, however, use the modern standard of 3.1 plate appearances per team game (422 in that season) which Lajoie fell 37 short of. Thus, MLB credits Delahanty with the 1902 title with his .376 average. Similarly the Hall of Fame lists the 1902 title on Delahanty's plaque and not Lajoie's.
• 1910a 1910b Before the 1910 season, Hugh Chalmers of Chalmers Automobile announced he would present a Chalmers Model 30 automobile to the player with the highest batting average at the end of the season. The 1910 race for best average in the American League was between Nap Lajoie of the Cleveland Indians and the Detroit Tigers' widely disliked Cobb. On the last day of the season, Lajoie overtook Cobb's batting average with seven bunt hits in a doubleheader against the St. Louis Browns. Browns' manager Jack O'Connor supposedly told his third baseman Red Corriden to play back down the line all day, which allowed Lajoie easy bunt hits. Cobb complained about the move, though American League President Ban Johnson said that a recalculation showed that Cobb had won the race anyway and Chalmers ultimately awarded cars to both players.
• 1954 Rules in 1954 required 2.6 at bats per team game, 400 for a 154-game schedule (the rule was changed in 1957 to the current requirement of 3.1 plate appearances per team game), to qualify for the title and hitless at bats could be added to reach this total. Ted Williams posted a .345 average in 1954 over only 386 at bats, and the required hitless at bats drop him below Avila's league-leading .341 average.