List of major league baseball career leaders

In baseball, the batting average (BA) is defined by the number of hits divided by bats. It is usually reported with three decimal places and pronounced as if multiplied by 1,000: a player with a batting average of .300 is “beating three hundred”. A point (or percentage point) is meant as .001. If necessary to break the ties, the bar averages could be raised to more than three decimal places.

Outfield player Ty Cobb, whose career ended in 1928, has the highest batting average in Major League Baseball (MLB) history. He hit .366 for 24 seasons, mostly with the Detroit Tigers. Additionally, he won a record 11 batting titles for leading the American League in BA over the course of an entire season. He beat over .360 in 11 consecutive seasons from 1909 to 1919. Roger Hornsby has the second highest BA of all time, at .358. He has won seven National League (NL) flying titles and has the highest NL average in a single season since 1900, when he beat .424 in 1924. He has beaten over .370 in six consecutive seasons.

Shoeless Joe Jackson is the only other player to finish his career with a batting average above .350. He hit .356 over 13 seasons before being permanently suspended from organized baseball in 1921 for his role in the Black Sox scandal. Lifty O’Doul first made it to the major leagues as a pitcher, but after developing a sore arm, he converted into 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 in Niagara Falls and died during the 1903 season.

The last player to beat 400. In one season, Ted Williams is seventh in the all-time BA rankings. Babe Ruth has struck for a career .342 on average and is 10th on the list. A player must have a minimum of 3,000 appearances to qualify for the roster.

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• Statistics updated to 26 September 2019.