Throughout almost all of Baseball's history the walk has been massively undervalued. All anyone cared about was how many times you would get base hits or home runs, but they failed to understand the significance of just getting on base in any way you can. A single and a walk are worth the exact same aount to a team with no runners on base, so why has all of history prioritized a single and treated a walk like an out?
Aaron Hicks' value comes from his elite defense, and his league high walk rate (20.4% this regular season). However, most casual fans looking batting average as the main decider of whether they hink a player is good. Hicks' batting average is pretty terrible from a first glance, but just a couple minutes of research can show how useless the statistic is. If I told you the #1 seed in the Al East had a worst batting average than the worst team in baseball this year, would you believe me? Its true, the Tampa Bay Rays (37-23) had a .254 batting average, and the Boston Red Sox (24-36) had a .265 batting average. This proves how useless batting average is, and why Aaron Hicks' .226 average means absolutely nothingbecause of how much he provides to the team in other ways.
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