List Of Major League Baseball Players With A Career .330 Batting Average
A baseball player's batting average (BA) statistic is calculated by dividing the number of hits by the number of at bats. In Major League Baseball (MLB), a .330 career batting average is relatively rare; only 30 players in MLB history have batted .330 for their careers, with a minimum of 3,000 plate appearances. All but three finished their careers before 1946. There have been 207 players who batted at least .300. Baseball historians consider .330 to be an outstanding batting average.
The fielding positions represented on the list are outfielders, first basemen, second basemen, and third basemen; there are no catchers or shortstops with a .330 BA. Outfielder Ty Cobb, whose career ended in 1928, has the highest batting average in MLB history. He batted .366 over 24 seasons, mostly with the Detroit Tigers. In addition, he won a record 11 batting titles for leading the American League in BA over the course of an entire season. He batted over .360 in 11 consecutive seasons from 1909 to 1919. Rogers Hornsby has the second highest BA of all-time, at .358. He won seven batting titles in the National League (NL) and has the highest NL average in a single season since 1900, when he batted .424 in 1924. He batted over .370 in six consecutive seasons.
Shoeless Joe Jackson is the only other player to finish his career with a .350 batting average. He batted .356 over 13 seasons before he was permanently suspended from organized baseball in 1921 for his role in the Black Sox Scandal. Lefty O'Doul first came to the major leagues as a pitcher, but after developing a sore arm, he converted to an outfielder and won two batting titles. The fifth player on the list, and the last with at least a .345 BA, is Ed Delahanty. Delahanty's career was cut short when he fell into the Niagara Falls and died during the 1903 season.
The last player to bat .400 in a season, Ted Williams, ranks eighth on the all-time career BA list. Babe Ruth is widely considered to be the greatest player in baseball history, and he hit for a career .342 average and is tenth on the list. There are no active MLB players with a .330 career BA. Albert Pujols holds the highest career batting average among active players, having batted .325 over 12 seasons. Tony Gwynn, who retired after the 2001 season, was the last active player on the list. Of the 30 players who have batted .330, 23 have been inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum.
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