Baseball Musings
Baseball Musings
May 29, 2002
Are RBI Men Bums?

Don Malcolm has an article in which he purports to find correlations between counting stats and on-base+slugging. When he does the comparison against RBI, here's what he believes he finds:


There are 34 players who’ve averaged 100 RBIs a year over the past three seasons. Amazing to think that Richie Sexson has more RBIs in that span than Barry Bonds, isn’t it? (Keep in mind that Barry missed 60 games in 1999; a better version of this stat would be RBI/G, but that doesn’t get the same knee-jerk reaction from guys who live to gnash their teeth…)

Most astonishing name on this list: Tony Batista. Next most astonishing: Garret Anderson.

In any event, only four of the 34 players on this list have an OPS below .850. That’s a lot better than the hits, doubles, and triples lists, and extremely close to the homer list. The fixation amongst statheads on RBI guys who are bums obscures the fact that very few RBI guys actually are bums.


Now, I'm basically a statshead, so I'll take exception to this.

The basic belief among people who Don refers to as statheads is that RBI are influenced by two things; the power of the batter (usually measured by slugging percentage) and the number of baserunners on in front of him. Now, really good players, those that have high OBA's and high slugging percentages usually bat 3rd or 4th. On a normal team, they are batting behind the leadoff hitters, who usually have the ability to get on base. So you would expect the best hitters to have a lot of RBI, because they are set up to get a lot of rbi!

What we statheads complain about is the beatification of players like Joe Carter, for no other reason than their RBI. Joe was a good player, and he drove in a lot of runs, but he used an awful lot of outs doing that. And Joe always had tons of people on base in front of him. In 1990, he probably could have driven in 100 runs bunting.

We don't think RBI men are bums. We think that players who are low dimensional and drive in runs are bums.


Posted by David Pinto at 09:07 PM | Baseball