MLB career batting leaders

These totals add up the leagues baseball counts as major. That means American League, National League and Negro Leagues, together with the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century major leagues — the American Association, the Union Association, the Players' League, the Federal League and the National Association of 1871 to 1875. Independent Black club seasons and the Black leagues that were never given major status are counted on each player's own page but not here, which is why a career total on this page can be smaller than the one you see beside his name elsewhere on this site.

Rate statistics need at least 2,600 plate appearances, and 2,390 players clear it. That cut-off is ours. It is not an official rule, and no governing body publishes one for career leaders. Without any minimum the top of the batting average, on-base percentage, slugging and OPS tables fills with men who came to the plate once, so a line is unavoidable; we set ours low enough that the short Negro League seasons are not punished for being short, and high enough that a few dozen games do not outrank a career. Counting statistics below have no minimum at all, because a one-game player cannot lead anything by accumulation.

Each table runs 11 places deep, with ties sharing a place. The categories are the same ones the season pages rank, minus fielding-independent pitching, which depends on a league constant that changes every year and cannot honestly be carried across a career. Career on-base percentage here divides by at-bats, walks and hit-by-pitches only: the source files have no sacrifice fly column, so leaving it out of the denominator matches published figures more closely than treating it as zero would.

Wins above replacement is our own calculation. We work it out season by season from the lines on this site and add them up, so it drifts from published versions over a long career — the further back and the longer the career, the wider the gap. Treat the WAR table as our reading of these files rather than as a record. Every other column is a plain sum of the seasons underneath it.

A total here can differ from the same player's total on his own page. That page adds every season he appeared in, including independent club seasons and leagues that were never given major status, because it is a record of one man's career. This page is a leaderboard, so it has to compare like with like and counts only the leagues named above. Where the two differ, neither is wrong and both say what they counted — which is the whole reason this paragraph exists.