Batting Average is the best-known and the most historic statistic in baseball. The batting average leader boards are printed daily in every newspaper and every baseball website in the country. Here are the leaders through games of June 12th:

Here we are in 2006 and every newspaper and every website in the country is wrong! (Well, I haven't checked them all, but . . .) You would think that in this day and age of computers and technology we could get this right, but here it is. The real leader in Batting Average in the National League is the Los Angeles Dodgers' Nomar Garciaparra. Here's his stat line:

Why doesn't he show? It's simply because they are using the wrong qualification rules. To make things easy, I'm sure a lot of sources are simply using at-bats as a qualifier. If they use 200 at-bats, Nomar falls off all the lists. But even if they go one step further and use the official qualifier (3.1 plate appearance per team game), Nomar falls short. The Dodgers have played 63 games, meaning that their players need 195 plate appearances to qualify. Nomar only has 194 plate appearances.

The key is to apply the qualification rule in its entirety. The plate appearance rule (3.1 plate appearances) is only part of it. The last part is that if a player falls short in plate appearances, you add enough hitless at-bats to his at-bat total and then see if he still leads the league in hitting. For Nomar, you add one hitless at-bat making the calculation 62-for-174 = .356. Since .356 would still lead the league, Nomar is the batting leader (with his actual .358 batting average).

This actually happened in 1996. Tony Gwynn fell four plate appearances short with 498 plate appearances. His recalculated batting average dropped to .349 from his actual .353 by adding four hitless at-bats. But the .349 still was better than Ellis Burks' .344, meaning that the batting champ was Tony Gwynn.

C'mon guys, let's get this right!