Batting average has a tidy, century-old appeal: hits divided by at-bats, one number, easy to read off the back of a card. It also quietly tells a lie. To batting average, a bloop single and a 450-foot home run are the same event — one hit — and a walk doesn’t happen at all. Weighted On-Base Average, almost always written wOBA, is the stat that stops pretending those things are equal.
If you only learn one “advanced” hitting number, make it this one. wOBA is built on a simple, defensible idea, it lives on a scale you already know, and it consistently ranks hitters more sensibly than the triple-crown stats it replaces.
What batting average misses
Two things sink batting average as a measure of offense. First, it throws away walks: a hitter who draws 100 free passes gets no credit, even though reaching base is the entire point of an at-bat. Second, it flattens every hit into a single undifferentiated unit. A double is worth meaningfully more than a single; a home run is worth more still. Treating them identically is like grading a test where every question is worth one point regardless of difficulty.
The result is that batting average routinely misranks hitters. You don’t have to take that on faith — the 2025 leaderboard makes it concrete a little further down.
The wOBA formula
wOBA assigns each way of reaching base a coefficient equal to its real, measured run value, then divides by plate appearances. The weights are recalculated every season from league-wide run expectancy; a representative recent-season version looks like this:
Read those coefficients left to right and the logic jumps out. An unintentional walk (0.69) is worth a little less than a single (0.89), which is worth less than a double (1.27), and a home run (2.10) is worth roughly three times a single. Those aren’t opinions; they’re the average number of runs each event has produced. Because the weights are anchored to the league’s on-base scale, wOBA conveniently reads on the same scale as on-base percentage: about .320 is league-average, .370 is very good, and .400 is most-valuable-player territory. FanGraphs publishes the exact yearly weights, which drift a few points as the run environment changes.
Reading the leaderboard
Here are the 2025 qualified leaders in wOBA, with batting average alongside. Aaron Judge sat on top of both lists at a .463 wOBA and a .331 average — when a hitter is genuinely the best, every stat agrees. The interesting cases are where the two columns disagree.
| Player | PA | AVG | wOBA | xwOBA |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aaron Judge | 679 | 0.331 | 0.463 | 0.46 |
| Nick Kurtz | 489 | 0.29 | 0.419 | 0.372 |
| Shohei Ohtani | 727 | 0.282 | 0.418 | 0.425 |
| George Springer | 586 | 0.309 | 0.408 | 0.404 |
| Ronald Acuña Jr. | 412 | 0.29 | 0.403 | 0.397 |
| Cal Raleigh | 705 | 0.247 | 0.392 | 0.371 |
| Kyle Schwarber | 724 | 0.24 | 0.391 | 0.401 |
| Juan Soto | 715 | 0.263 | 0.39 | 0.429 |
| Will Smith | 436 | 0.296 | 0.389 | 0.378 |
| Kyle Stowers | 457 | 0.288 | 0.386 | 0.375 |
| Ketel Marte | 556 | 0.283 | 0.381 | 0.39 |
| Jonathan Aranda | 422 | 0.316 | 0.381 | 0.382 |
Look at Kyle Schwarber and Jonathan Aranda. Aranda hit .316 — seventy-six points higher than Schwarber’s .240 — and yet Schwarber finished with the higher wOBA (.391 to .381). Batting average says Aranda was the clearly better hitter that season; wOBA, which sees Schwarber’s walks and home runs, says it was the other way around. Juan Soto is the same story in miniature: a modest-looking .263 average wrapped around a .390 wOBA, because almost everything Soto does at the plate — walk, double, homer — is the high-value kind.
wOBA vs. xwOBA
The rightmost column in that table is xwOBA, or expected wOBA. Statcast computes it from the launch speed and angle of each batted ball: given how hard and at what angle a hitter struck the ball, what wOBA would that contact normally produce? It strips out luck, defense, and ballpark.
Most of the time wOBA and xwOBA sit close together — Judge’s .463 and .460 are practically identical, which is another way of saying his monster line was entirely earned. But Soto’s .390 wOBA came with a .429 xwOBA: his contact deserved a great deal more than the scoreboard gave him, a strong hint that his surface numbers were due to climb. That gap between done and deserved is the whole subject of expected stats, and wOBA is the cleanest place to start seeing it.
When to use wOBA — and when not to
Reach for wOBA whenever you want a single, park-neutral-ish snapshot of how much a hitter has helped his team score. It’s the backbone of more familiar stats, too: wRC+ is essentially wOBA translated to a 100-is-average scale and adjusted for park and league.
Two honest caveats. wOBA in its basic form is not park-adjusted, so a hitter in Coors Field gets a small unearned boost — use wRC+ when that matters. And like any rate stat, it needs a real sample; fifty plate appearances of wOBA tell you almost nothing. Give it a few hundred and it becomes one of the most reliable hitting numbers there is.
The bottom line
Batting average answers “how often did this player get a hit?” wOBA answers the question you actually care about: “how much did this player help his team score?” One of those is trivia; the other is the point of hitting. Once you’ve seen a .240 hitter out-produce a .316 hitter, it’s hard to go back.
Sources & Further Reading
- Leaderboard data: Baseball Savant (Statcast expected-statistics leaderboard). Numbers retrieved June 2026; re-runnable via
scripts/woba_leaders.py. - FanGraphs Library — wOBA, including the current-season linear weights.
- Tom Tango, Mitchel Lichtman & Andrew Dolphin, The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball — the origin of the run-value weights.