This started out as a PM to Vinny, but I decided to just make it a thread and maybe something of interest can come of it for all of us.

I got into a discussion today at lunch with a co-worker, and now I'm looking for some stats.

The question was, do batters hit for a better average at the beginning of the season, at the end of the season, or is it the same? Basically, we're trying to find historical batting averages by month.

It's a bit difficult to explain, since we're not looking for cumulative numbers (numbers for May that would include April, etc), rather just for historical averages for batters during the months of April, May, June, July, August & September (only for at bats that took place during each of those months).

I'm not sure if I am making any sense here. I tried Googling, but no luck.

I'm sure this info is out there, but thought I would ask if anyone here knows of a place where I could find such a stat. (Elias, Stats Inc, Baseball Prospectus, etc.)

Any help appreciated.

Don't have the answer, but make sure to pay attention (if it pertains to the discussion) to the lower averages of players in colder weather.

My guess would be lower avg. overall in leagues earlier in the year.

Yeah, we've discussed a lot of variables like weather. But a third guy that came into the discussion thinks that hitters are always ahead of pitchers and then pitchers figure out how to pitch guys more effectively, and not vice versa.

I'm seriously torn, but I'm dying to see the stats to see how it shakes down.

I know how to find it by player but not by team or league as a whole, which is what I think you need.

By player, you can find it on each player's split stats on Yahoo, for example here:

http://sports.yahoo.com/mlb/players/7256/splits;_ylt=AnFVehXij_uujh8ztVn30XiFCLcF?year=2005&type=Batting

I'm looking for something that does it for whole teams or leagues. Very interesting discussion.

This is pretty random, but if you scroll down on this page, it has month by month team averages for the 2003 season.
Look in the green boxes under the crazy graphs.

This is for the nl east:
http://www.baseballgraphs.com/nleast.html

The site's hard to navigate, but if you change the url where it says "nleast" you can find the other divisions. For example, http://www.baseballgraphs.com/alcent.html is the AL central.

http://www.baseballreference.com/

I'm not going to dig though the stats, but i guess you can find what you're looking for there

Thanks for all the help, but the thing Vinny posted is about as close as I have come.

The mystery remains.