Thank you for taking time to make such a detailed explanation of why the GWRBI is not used anymore. I am thinking it may have been better to just post the GWRBI in the boxscore if it was during the 7th, 8th or 9th or in extra innings...sort of like a late pressure GWRBI. It does make perfect sense that the best RBI man of a team would have the most GWRBI's in a season so I understand that reasoning.

What's interesting is, we all agreed GWRBI is a worthless stat, but wins for pitchers is figured the exact same way. I'm not as down on "wins" as some, but it's hard to disagree that the method for figuring them is a bit odd.

What if they altered the stat definition to only include RBI's from the later innings...like maybe 6th inning onward or 7th inning onward, and then go further by making it only include RBI's if the team's coming from behind to win.

Maybe that still wouldn't help prove who a clutch player is any more than all the other stuff, but it certainly could be a good stat to sum up a clutch player instead of having to look at all their stats and figure it out?

And if I remember right, Keith Hernandez had more GWRBI's than anyone but I don't remember him being generally considered one of the guys with the most RBI, so I never really followed that argument people use that the GWRBI was usually gotten by whoever had the most RBI's.

It all makes me wonder tho...exactly what stat or stats, really reveal a clutch player? I never really hear people talk about that when they say that GWRBI's fall short of showing it. There must be something better, right? Is it OPS? RBI's themselves? TB's? Something else?

I think that even if you restricted to the late innings, all you would find is that the players with the most RBIs tend to have the most GWRBIs. I think Bill James put it best when he said (to paraphrase): "There certainly is such a thing as clutch hitting; you can see it every week. But there is no evidence for the existence of a class of clutch hitters."

There is evidence. Google: "Andy Dolphin" Clutch.

Devon, if you're still around. I seem to recall a baseball card of Keith Hernandez's in the mid-80s that showed he led the league in GWRBIs the previous year. If you saw the same card, it's possible that's how you have the impression he was a leading GWRBI guy ... because I don't recall any other cards having that info for any other players. The card company may have only used that stat around that time for a year or two, giving anyone who happened to see KH's card that year this "odd feeling" that KH was a real GWRBI hitter. Of course, this is just anecdotal evidence.