bat five hundred
To be successful half of the time; to have a success rate of 50%.
Meaning adapted from Wiktionary, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
“I only bat five hundred when I try to cook dinner.”
“My sales pitches are hit or miss, so I usually bat five hundred at work.”
“Although the young lawyer shows great promise, she currently bats five hundred in the courtroom, winning half her cases.”
The term originates from the statistical conventions of baseball, specifically the practice of reckoning a hitter's batting average in thousandths. A player attaining a success rate of five hundred out of one thousand is thus described as batting five hundred.
- 01
a hundred and ten percent
A level of effort beyond what one can usually sustain; great exertion.
- 02
bat a thousand
To achieve success at each attempt.
- 03
bat an eyelid
To react in any slight way; to respond; to care.
- 04
bat for the other team
To be homosexual.
- 05
bat one's eyes
To signal or feign by fluttering one's eyelids, as romantic interest.
- 06
bat the breeze
To chat; to shoot the breeze.
- 07
be a hundred years too early
To be so immature and unprepared as to have no hope of achieving an accomplishment.
- 08
count to five
Synonym of count to ten.
Last updated August 10, 2026