Plate Appearance
Every trip to the plate, whatever happens.
What it actually is. Every trip to the plate that ends: hits, outs, walks, hit by pitches, sacrifices, everything. It is the true denominator of a hitter's season.
What a scout reads off it. Plate appearances are the quiet half of every counting stat. Thirty home runs in six hundred trips and thirty in four hundred are not the same season, and the second one is a much better hitter having a shorter year.
Where the lines are. The qualifying line for a batting title is 3.1 plate appearances per team game, which comes to 502 in a 162-game season. That number is the reason a leaderboard has a cutoff at all.
Batter's Eye: look up anything in baseball