How many times is a team up to bat in one inning?

Answer 1

The number of plate appearances a batter can have in a season is totally dependent upon the number of games the team plays in a season, and if a player played the entire game in each of them.

In Major League Baseball, each team plays 162 games. There are a minimum of 27 plate appearances for each team, so each position in the batting order would have a minimum of three plate appearances. (However, if the home team is ahead, they do not bat in the bottom of the 9th inning, so they would have potentially fewer plate appearances in those games, but let's ignore that for this exercise.)

So, if a single, individual player played all nine innings of all 162 games, and came up to bat a minimum of 3 times per game, he would have a minimum of 486 plate appearances at the end of the season.

Plate appearances are not the same thing as at-bats. If the batter reaches bases on a walk or is hit by a pitch, or if he sacrifices, it is a plate appearance, but it doesn't count as an at-bat in the statistics.

According to Baseball-reference.com, Hank Aaron averaged 606 plate appearances and 538 at-bats a season over his 23 season career, while Cal Ripken, Jr. averaged 613 plate appearances and 550 at-bats per season over the course of his 21 season career. These guys were both iron men, and probably averaged more plate appearances than current players do, but it's a good comparison.

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