I like to look at it and note the spread between it and the OBP. I’m happy when players have about a 70 point spread between the two, the more the better. As with all baseball stats, the more numbers you look at together, the better idea you’ll have of their performance. No one number tells the whole story in player evaluation. (unless that number is 5 HRs hit in one game or something…)

good old fashioned Triple Crown numbers along w/ the current ones.

It gives me an idea about how good they are when they aren’t walking. Walks are a less variable aspect of the game – a guy who walks 30 times a year or a 100 times a year is going to do that hot or cold. Batting average gives you an idea how the guy is doing in the short term – saying Chris Davis is batting .050 in the last week, or Kinsler is batting .160 on the road and .420 at home is far more intuitive than the respective OBP numbers for me. Sure, OBP gives you the same thing, but I just prefer to eliminate the contribution of walks to a guy’s isolated performance ups and downs.

I don’t think you should ever look at batting average to judge his value without the context of a player’s OBP. But then again, I don’t think that you should ever look at any one stat in isolation.

wOBA is starting to be one that I prefer using all the time (though not enough people are that familiar with it yet). EQA is good too, but I don’t like going to BP to get it over Fangraphs. I still use the BA/OBP/SLG which gives a nice idea of how the player is doing and everyone is familiar with it as well as knows what a good or bad line is, but it is far from the best out there.