My home league went to OBP back in 1998 (true story). We were well ahead of the curve (I have been my whole life, it's why I was always called the teacher's pet - forward thinking and intelligence aren't cool when you're seven years old. Who gets the last laugh now Jason? Suck it). Why did we make that move then and why should you make the move now? Simple really. Follow me here.

The goal in baseball, offensively, is to score runs. How do you score runs? By getting on base.

The more times one reaches base, the greater the odds that his team will score a run. 

What does OBP measure? Your ability to get on base, of course. That's why it has an inherent advantage over batting average, which merely measures the hits a batter accrues.

What is the most valuable asset a team can possess? Hopefully you said - outs. You get 27 in a nine-inning game, that's it. Every chance you get to avoid making an out not only aids you in scoring runs, it allows you to maintain possession of the most significant power you have offensively. Which category speaks to that talent, batting average or OBP? Exactly.

A real world example follows.

Dee Gordon hit .289. The league average was .251 meaning he exceeded the standard by .038 points. That's really good. At the same time his OBP was .326, just .012 points above the league average. That's not good at all. 

Brian Dozier hit .242, nine points below the league average. That's bad. However, due mainly to 89 walks, his OBP was .345. That mark was .031 points above the 2014 league average. In addition, though Dozier hit .047 points lower than Gordon, his OBP was actually .019 points higher. Simply put, Dozier's ability to get on base rewarded his team with more chances to score, per plate appearance, than did Gordon. 

The fact of the matter is that batting average is an outdated mode of analysis from a bygone era. It's no longer 1915, it's 2015. We need to move past batting average as a rationale for determining the overall offensive effectiveness of a hitter (for pitchers we should probably dump ERA, but I'll save that argument for another day - or at least a coming article in the strategy section).

The name of the game is getting on base and earning bases, which is why using OPS instead of batting average and OBP might be the best option (OPS considers the ability to get on base - OBP - and to generate bases - SLG - resulting in a very strong correlation to overall player performance without getting into all kinds of fancy math an in-depth analysis). I don't want to cause too much uneasiness in making the switch from batting average so let's just say moving to OBP makes a lot of sense (we moved to OBP in Tout Wars, one of the three main industry experts leagues).