Absolutely, and the Joe Morgan-Dusty Baker crowd love to act like the "stat geeks" don't know this. Of course any hit has to be at least as good as a walk, and there isn't any stat geek out there who wouldn't say that a guy with a .350 batting average is more valuable than a guy with a .350 OBP. It's the guys with .250 BAs and .370 OBPs that are so consistently underrated by some compared to those with .300 BAs and .320 OBPs.
The team with the worst record in the league of the player (in this case, National) has the first claim of a player on waivers. NOT the team with the worst record in baseball.
I may have worded that poorly. I wasn't comparing Dunn and Drew as hitters. I was just saying that they have both historically been good OBP guys and when Drew strikes out it seems more of a result of taking pitches that he probably could have hit hard early in the at bat. My point about hits being better than walks is because runners can advance farther on the majority of hits than they could on walks. If two players both had an OBP of .400 and one was hitting .215 with a lot of Ks and BBs, and the other was hitting .320 with fewer BBs and Ks, which is more valuable? Obviously Dunn is a better option than a guy with a much lower OBP, but if that's similar, AVG can be useful to give one guy an edge.
That is only the case if they are comparable in terms of power, 3rd brought up the example of a Luis Castillo who is basically a slap hitter with good OBP, but I'll take Dunn anyday of the week even if Castillo is batting .300 and has the same OBP, to me total bases that a player gets is a better indicator of how good a player is than BA. BA is way overrated.
Well, if they guy is getting bloop/infield singles those are pretty much walks anyway as far as advancing runners.
I'll take power hitters everyday of the week over slap hitters, and Dunn is one of the best in that department.
As I said in my later post, this is of course true, but not the comparisons that people get so egregiously wrong. An example of what you're saying is Adam Dunn versus David Wright - Wright's career OPS is .919, while Dunn's is .900, so there's not a tremendous difference there. Given that, Wright's BA of .308 certainly shows that he is a better (and more valuable) hitter than Dunn, with his .247 BA. It's when people think that Dunn isn't far better than the David Ecksteins (.285/.351/.361) of the world that it gets crazy.
