On-base plus slugging

On-base plus slugging is a sabermetric baseball statistic calculated as the sum of a player's on-base percentage and slugging percentage. The ability of a player both to get on base and to hit for power, two important offensive skills, are represented. An OPS of.800 or higher in Major League Baseball puts the player in the upper echelon of hitters. Typically, the league leader in OPS will score near, and sometimes above, the 1.000 mark.

Equation

The basic equation is
where OBP is on-base percentage and SLG is slugging average. These averages are defined below as:
- the numerator "H + BB + HBP" effectively means "number of trips to first base at least"
- the denominator "AB + BB + SF + HBP" effectively means "total plate appearances", but does not include sacrifice bunts
This is because though a batter makes a trip to the plate he is not given an "AB" when he walks or when he hits the ball into play and is called out, but the action allows a run to score. As a result, the 4 counts are needed to calculate a batter's total trips to the plate.
and
where:

H = hits
BB = bases on balls
HBP = times hit by pitch
AB = at bats
SF = sacrifice flies
TB = total bases

In one equation, OPS can be represented as:

History

On-base plus slugging was first popularized in 1984 by John Thorn and Pete Palmer's book, The Hidden Game of Baseball. The New York Times then began carrying the leaders in this statistic in its weekly "By the Numbers" box, a feature that continued for four years. Baseball journalist Peter Gammons used and evangelized the statistic, and other writers and broadcasters picked it up. The popularity of OPS gradually spread, and by 2004 it began appearing on Topps baseball cards.
OPS was formerly sometimes known as production. For instance, production was included in early versions of Thorn's Total Baseball encyclopedia, and in the Strat-O-Matic Computer Baseball game. This term has fallen out of use.
OPS gained popularity because of the availability of its components, OBP and SLG, and that team OPS correlates well with team runs scored.

An OPS scale

, in his essay titled "The 96 Families of Hitters" uses seven different categories for classification by OPS:

Category	Classification	OPS range
A	Great	.9000 and higher
B	Very good	.8334 to.8999
C	Above average	.7667 to.8333
D	Average	.7000 to.7666
E	Below average	.6334 to.6999
F	Poor	.5667 to.6333
G	Very poor	.5666 and lower

This effectively transforms OPS into a seven-point ordinal scale. Substituting quality labels such as excellent, very good, good, average, fair, poor and very poor for the A–G categories creates a subjective reference for OPS values.

Leaders

The top ten Major League Baseball players in lifetime OPS, with at least 3,000 plate appearances as of 2025, were:

Babe Ruth, 1.1636
Ted Williams, 1.1155
Lou Gehrig, 1.0798
Oscar Charleston, 1.0639
Barry Bonds, 1.0512
Jimmie Foxx, 1.0376
Turkey Stearnes, 1.0325
Mule Suttles, 1.0299
Aaron Judge, 1.0282
Hank Greenberg, 1.0169

The top five were all left-handed batters. Jimmie Foxx has the highest career OPS for a right-handed batter.
The top ten single-season performances in MLB are:

Josh Gibson, 1.4744
Josh Gibson, 1.4271
Barry Bonds, 1.4217
Charlie Smith, 1.4214
Barry Bonds, 1.3807
Babe Ruth, 1.3791
Barry Bonds, 1.3785
Babe Ruth, 1.3586
Mule Suttles, 1.3489
Mule Suttles, 1.3247

Gibson holds the highest single-season OPS for a right-hander, while Barry Bonds holds the record for a left-hander. Since 1944, the highest single-season OPS for a right-hander is 1.2224 by Mark McGwire in, which was 28th all-time.

Adjusted OPS (OPS+)

OPS+, adjusted OPS, is a closely related statistic. OPS+ is OPS adjusted for the park and the league in which the player played. An OPS+ of 100 is defined to be the league average. An OPS+ of 150 or more is excellent and 125 very good, while an OPS+ of 75 or below is poor.
The basic equation for OPS+ is
where *lgOBP is the park-adjusted OBP of the league and *lgSLG is the park-adjusted SLG of the league.
A common misconception is that OPS+ closely matches the ratio of a player's OPS to that of their league. In fact, due to the additive nature of the two components in OPS+, a player with an OBP and SLG both 50% better than the league average in those metrics will have an OPS+ of 200 while still having an OPS that is only 50% better than the average OPS of the league. It would be a better approximation to say that a player with an OPS+ of 150 produces 50% more runs, in a given set of plate appearances than a player with an OPS+ of 100.

Leaders in OPS+

Through the end of the 2025 season, the career top twenty leaders in OPS+ were:

Babe Ruth, 206
Ted Williams, 191
Oscar Charleston, 184
Barry Bonds, 182
Aaron Judge, 179
Lou Gehrig, 179
Turkey Stearnes, 177
Rogers Hornsby, 175
Mickey Mantle, 172
Mule Suttles, 172
Dan Brouthers, 171
Joe Jackson, 170
Mike Trout, 169
Ty Cobb, 168
Pete Browning, 163
Jimmie Foxx, 163
Mark McGwire, 163
Dave Orr, 162
Shohei Ohtani, 160
Juan Soto, 160

The only purely right-handed batters to appear on this list are Hornsby, Judge, Trout, Suttles, Browning, Foxx, McGwire, Orr, and Greenberg. Mantle is the only switch-hitter in the group.
The top ten single-season performances were:

Josh Gibson, 281
Josh Gibson, 273
Barry Bonds, 268
Barry Bonds, 263
Barry Bonds, 259
Fred Dunlap, 256 *
Babe Ruth, 255
Mule Suttles, 253
Oscar Charleston, 251
Josh Gibson, 251

* Fred Dunlap's historic 1884 season came in the Union Association, which some baseball experts consider not to be a true major league. If Dunlap's seasons were to be eliminated from the list, Charleston's 1921 season would be on the list.

Criticism

Despite its simple calculation, OPS is a controversial measurement. OPS weighs on-base percentage and slugging percentage equally. However, on-base percentage correlates better with scoring runs. Statistics such as wOBA build on this distinction using linear weights. Additionally, the components of OPS are not typically equal. As a point of reference, the OPS for all of Major League Baseball in 2024 was.711.