Baseball: What is an at Bat?

An at bat is a statistic that is tallied in the game of baseball. This is also known by different names. Other terms used to refer to this are also 'up to bat', 'at the plate' or 'up'. However, 'at bat' is the official term used. This is abbreviated by 'AB'. The definition of an at bat is when a player receives certain outcomes after facing a pitcher in the game. An at bat is counted for any type of at bat except when a batter receives a walk or base-on-balls, a batter is hit by a pitch (HBP), a batter gets out due to a sacrifice hit, if there is an obstruction from the catcher, if the batter is awarded first base for any reason, or the inning ends and the batter did not complete his batting turn.

Section 10 of the official rules said that an at bat is the number of times that a player has batted in a game. This excludes when certain events happen to a player, such as they hit a sacrifice, they are awarded first base due to a walk, they are hit by a pitch, or are given first base due to an obstruction.

Therefore, an at bat can occur in many instances. Some common examples are when the player reaches any base due to a hit or if the batter reaches on base due to an error. If a player is called out for any reason other than a sacrifice, then this is an at bat. While the term used in at bat' the term 'official at bat' may be used to designate the official times a player has been up and disregarding the times the player's at bat didn't count.

While counting the amount of times a player has official at bats seems silly, it is actually a major part of counting statistics in baseball. They are used to calculate different statistics. For example, batting average, on base percentage, and slugging percentage all depend on the amount of times a player has had official at bats.

A more restricted area of at bats are called plate appearances. Plate appearances are different, as they add only a couple outcomes together to determine this statistic. Plate appearances are counted by adding the amount of walks a player has drawn, the amount of times they have been hit by pitches, the amount of hits that are classified as sacrifice hits, and the amount of times a player has reached due to interference from the other team.

Wikipedia, at bat