Re-thinking RBI
First of all, I'd like to state that the plural of RBI is: RBI. I can't stress that enough. "RsBI" looks and sounds stupid, and "RBIs" really messes with my brain. The "R" stands for "runs", not "run". It's like saying "Rio Grande River" or "ATM Machine". Please, everyone in the baseball community, let's make a stand. The plural of "RBI" is: "RBI".Now, RBI, to me, is a very minor part of a baseball player's performance. What is more important than the number of runs a player... bats in is the number of times a player can safely reach base (one of the primary reasons being that when a batter-runner reaches base safely with runners in scoring position, an RBI is likely to result). Beyond that, extra-base hits are the next-most-desirable result, being that extra-base hits will almost certainly score RISP, as well as place the batter-runner in scoring position himself.
RBI measures up to all this as simply a peripheral and somewhat chance-oriented manifestation of overall offensive production. It is true that to some extent, the players with the most RBI are also the most productive hitters; hitters that have the skill to take advantage of RBI-scoring opportunites simply because they reach base safely and productively a greater percent of the time. There are, however, factors not under the batter's control, the two most prominent being a) whether there are actually runners on base and b) the batter's place in the order, which both determines how many plate appearances a batter will have and which batters will hit ahead of him, each of whom have their own skill levels and therefore likelihood of reaching base.
Thus it stands to reason that at a local level, RBI tells us very little about a hitter's production. It is obvious that someone that had 100 RBI had a better year than someone that had 20, but what I mean by a local level is that in a group of hitters of similar skill, RBI alone would be useless in separating hitters within the group. There are too many factors that are out of the batter's control. What would be better would be if players could be compared as to how many times they create RBI when they have the opportunity. This is crude at best and is not even close to being a new, interesting stat, but hell, it's better than RBI. The sample I took to examine is the top 50 RBI-getters of 2006. The table below shows their RBI, their plate appearances with RISP, and finally how many RBI they created per such plate appearance. This system also rewards players that create RBI without RISP by considering it additionally in the division. Here's the chart (due to me not being an HTML whizz, the three pages of it will appear with a slight separation):
Now here's the chart sorted by RBI/OPP:
Now my motives might start to sneak through. Last fall I argued ad nauseum that Albert Pujols should have been the NL MVP instead of Ryan Howard, and that anyone should have been the AL MVP instead of Justin Morneau. Interestingly enough, I didn't properly emphasize the extreme favor the writers seem to give to RBI during the voting, ignoring all of the evidence above. When I sort the players by RBI/OPP, Pujols shoots to the top, and six American League players move in front of Morneau. This is, of course, not to say that Howard and Morneau are not great players. They are. This isn't even to say that they shouldn't have won their respective MVP awards; besides the fact that the MVP award is essentially meaningless, there are many more factors to consider anyway.
The last chart sorts the players by the amount of spaces on the list they were displaced with the new criteria:
An interesting thing is that on each pole of the chart, we see players that had uncharacteristic seasons. (A career year for Brian McCann and an off-year for Alex Rodriguez.) On each extreme, we see that the new way of looking at RBI re-enforces common opinion rather than disproves it. It is more towards the middle of the chart that we see players unfairly represented by their RBI totals (Adam Dunn, Travis Hafner, Jeff Francoeur, Howard, Morneau, Derek Jeter). This speaks to the simplicity of the improvement and the crudity of any evalutaion derived from RBI. This method is only slightly better than looking at pure RBI (which leads me to wonder what use RBI has at all). Even the intangible idea of clutch hitting has better evaluators attached to it.
Of course, RBI being a cumulative stat, it falls victim to things like injuries. This is just another indicator that stats like OBP and SLG are much, MUCH better indicators of overall production than RBI. Every stat should be considered alongside games played, but at least with the more over-arching rate stats you don't have to do as much thinking to really figure out what's going on.
Epilogue
Oh and also: now, I'm a big fan of Rodriguez. But anyone that tries to rationalize his 2006 by saying "well look, he still drove in 121 runs" is officially barking up the wrong tree, or even forest. His lineup helped his numbers tremendously in 2006.
Labels: albert pujols, alex rodriguez, justin morneau, RBI, ryan howard
posted by Carnival @ 3/22/2007
3 Comments:
Interesting argument. Did you come up with the RBI/Opp or is that a standard ratio in the math world of overanalysing baseball?
Don't mistake my sarcasm towards the end of that sentence: I think that ratio could be a great indication in the "clutchness" of a player. I mean, look who is at the bottom of that list.
I did make up RBI/OPP, although it's not a concept foreign to anyone that has thought about RBI and how to properly relate them to player performance.
There are a lot of problems with quantifying clutch hitting. No, I don't think this means it's best just to go with what we see, because we don't see every at bat of every game. One of the biggest problems comes with defining "clutch", which 100 different people would do 100 different ways.
I disagree with the fact that A-Rod being at the bottom of this list means he is the least clutch; if it means ANYTHING, it means that he is less clutch than his RBI makes it seem. But what you are forgetting is that this sample is taken ONLY from the top 50 RBI-getters in the major leagues. So, if you really want to use RBI/OPP to quantify clutchness (which, again, I don't recommend), you're calling A-Rod the 50th-best clutch hitter in a 750-player field, and baby, I'll take that player any day.
Of course that's not what that means even if all the above is true, because many would certainly have leapfrogged A-Rod if all were included.
Now back to clutch; let's take two players at the opposite ends of clutch like, oh, I don't know, A-Rod and David Ortiz. No one in the world thinks that A-Rod is a better clutch hitter than Ortiz, including me. Here, however, are their career RBI/OPPS:
A-Rod: 0.6251
Ortiz: 0.5860
We're going to cross paths here for a moment. Here is what I think makes Ortiz scarier in a tight spot than A-Rod:
1) The high-profileness of the situtations in which he has succeeded and A-Rod has failed.
2) Ortiz being left-handed.
3) This is the biggest one: Ortiz has a much shorter swing. This makes it nearly impossible to jam him; if you try, you'll be looking at Pesky's pole real quick. Many pitchers fall back on this in a tight spot; between going away and in to a hitter, they'll usually choose in which is more enticing for a hitter and more likely to get him to swing at a bad pitch. Ortiz's Bonds-esque short swing gives him the advantage over A-Rod's Griffey-esque arm-extension in this department.
4) Nerves are a part of it, but I believe a very small part.
Anyway, there it is.
Just write and say RBIs. That's the way it's been said for a century.
You wouldn't write AG to collectively describe the 50 state Attorneys General, would you? Does the US Army eat a single MRE or does it subsist on MREs? Were they looking for WMDs or just a single weapon?
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