Baseball Notes

If you know some of my thoughts on baseball, you know I am an RBI skeptic. I admit it, I am not taken aback by massive RBI numbers like so many of our media and fantasy players these days. RBIs, as I hope to show you, are not a very telling statistic, but they so often contribute to a player getting more All Star votes or MVP votes at the end of the year, or recognition on fantasy teams, etc.

Any good sabermetrician can tell you that RBI are purely circumstantial. They depend on so many different factors: where you bat in the lineup, are you in the NL or AL, who bats in front of you, who bats behind you, how many times you come up with players on, are they in scoring position, how many times do you drive yourself in, how many times do you lead off an inning, etc.

Even in his Sabermetric Manifesto, David Grabiner points out one of the problems with RBI that make them incomplete. And that is simply that “they measure a lot of things which are not the players’ own contribution.” You can’t drive in players who don’t get on base (except by home run. He correctly points out that players who bat behind teammates with high OBPs (”better players” as he puts it) tend to get more RBI.

But it was something he wrote next that made me want to run some numbers to test some things. He states:

In fact, the league leaders in RBI are much more likely to be the players who batted with the most teammates on base or in scoring position (not the batter’s contribution) than those who hit the best with runners on base or in scoring position. Thus RBI are a better measure of who had the most chances to drive in runners than of who was the best at driving in runners.

This is probably quite contradictory to what many people think. It seems logical to think that those who are the best at driving in runs, or who have the highest average with runners on or runners in scoring position (RISP), would accumulate the most RBI. But maybe that’s not the case. Maybe it’s all about opportunity.

So that’s where I want to go from here. I am going to take some of the top RBI men from each of the past three seasons to see which side they fall on. Fortunately, with some helpful tools, we can do this quite simply. Of course, you can find anywhere the league leaders in RBI for the past three years, so that is easy. Our biggest help here will be the RBI Opportunities page on Baseball Prospectus’ website. It lists, amongst other things, plate appearances every player had with men on, the percentage of men driven in, who came up to bat with the most men during a season, and more.

So we will start with the top five RBI leaders in each league from 2004 to 2006:

Geez, I sure didn’t remember that Castilla led the league in RBI just three years ago. Anyway, these are their numbers. So now I will, year by year, break these down by each batter’s average with RISP and then the numbers on base they had during that season and the percentage of those numbers they drove in. I also was able to dig up averages w/ RISP ranks from The Hardball Times for those three years. Now, we can see how each hitter fell into the separate categories. I have included notes on this chart to explain all of the different stats.

What becomes obvious after looking at this chart for a few minutes is that, without even running the numbers, there is a much stronger correlation between high RBI numbers and runners seen on base than there is between high RBI and a high average with RISP.

For the league leaders for each league during these three years, the ranks of number of men on base for the player’s plate appearances are fourth, first, third, second, first, and first. Conversely, the ranks of average with RISP for the RBI leaders in those three years are 42nd, 55th, 5th, 75th, 12th, and 54th. Only one of the six is even in the top ten in avg. with RISP, that being Ortiz in 2005.

Further study of the number shows some pretty telling signs as well. Only three times in the 30 players above was there a batter who was not in the top 17 for ROB during their plate appearances (Dye in 2006, and Rolen and Beltre in 2004). Adrian Beltre, at 27th, has the lowest ranking for any player when determining ROB. For the ranking on average with RISP, there are nine players lower than 27th for their respective year - almost a third of our subjects.

So, apparently, David Grabiner and all other sabermetricians are on the right track. Batting averages can be deceiving and misleading with looked at without any context, even averages as specialized as BARISP. You could have someone who batted .500 with runners in scoring position over 100 plate appearances - but what does that tell you? If that player only had 14 appearances with RISP, you would rather be in the situation with a hitter that bats .315 with RISP but has 44 appearances over 100 PAs.

When batting, circumstances create opportunity, and it is what hitters do with that opportunity that makes them great versus just mediocre. But, like we mentioned earlier, a batter can not control what the players ahead of him do, he can not put runners on base ahead of him who are not there, he can not control how fast they are, and he can not control whether he leads off an inning three times in a game. As with so many things in baseball, how many runners a batter sees on base when he is up has a whole lot to do with luck. A manager knows this, but tries to generally manage that risk by setting his batting order by placing the highest OBP guys in front of the guys who have the most power or the highest SLG% (at least that is how it would work in an ideal world).

Hitters with the most opportunity will have the greatest success rate in driving runs. Whether you are Albert Pujols of 2006 (.397 with RISP) or Andruw Jones of 2005 (.207 with RISP) - you need the hitters ahead of you to do their job before you can start worrying about how good you are at driving them in.