Why rbis dont matter

The key is you have to reward them for all runner advancements, not just the ones that lead to runs. Follow and interact with him on Twitter NeilWeinberg Is he a better hitter in the second scenario? You can flag a comment by clicking its flag icon. Website admin will know that you reported it. Admins may or may not choose to remove the comment or block the author.

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Mike Trout. Nick Castellanos. Even among the jewels of the Triple Crown, it is tertiary. You can be the batting champion by leading the league in average. The leader in homers is the home run king. The RBI leader is just some guy who drove in a bunch of runs.

Even the career RBI leaders list is a historical jumble. While both Gonzalez and Abreu are fine players, Trout is miles ahead of them in terms of talent and everyone else in the MLB , but he still finished far down the RBI leaderboards.

Pujols is decidedly past his prime, whereas his teammate Trout is just entering his. But evaluators know that Trout was the more productive player by far — so RBI fails us in this instance. The first being Pujols, despite being past his prime, still is a capable batter. He can still muscle home runs, doubles and knock base hits. This is the part of RBI that Pujols can control — this is part of a 39 percent that takes into account a player's batting skills, discussed further below.

The second part is Pujols' positioning in the order. Players who accumulate RBI are clearly valuable, which would seem to lend credence to the notion that the RBI is the ultimate measure of individual value as far as hitters go. Traditionalists view the RBI as a sign of individual prowess, but these days we know a lot better. The RBI has long since been recognized for what it really is: A stat that has less to do with a hitter's bat and more to do with the lineup around him.

The RBI is, in essence, a team-oriented stat. To gather a lot of RBI, a hitter has to come to the plate with runners on base consistently, and that's something that's dependent on a his spot in the lineup and b the hitters who hit ahead of him. This isn't an idea that was thought up in a lab somewhere or conjured on some kind of supercomputer. This is a practical fact. To do his job, a great RBI man therefore needs his teammates to do their jobs. Take Hack Wilson, for example.

He set a single-season record by driving in runs in , a mark that's not likely to be broken. And the reason it's not likely to be broken actually has little to do with Wilson and everything to do with the table-setters he had that year.

Every baseball fan knows Wilson's name, but few will know the names Woody English and Kiki Cuyler when they hear them. These are the guys who played a huge role in making Wilson's RBI season possible, as English posted a. In , no qualified player posted an OBP over.

It's uncommon enough for two players to post OBPs that high in a single season, let alone two players on a single team who happen to hit back-to-back. The point: These two guys were on base in front of Wilson pretty much all the time. And since he hit. Wilson certainly had a great year in , but it wasn't totally original if you restrict your sights to his batting average and slugging percentage while disregarding his RBI total. Throughout baseball history, there have been 27 other incidents in which a player hit.

Conceivably, any of the players who managed to do so could have driven in runs had they been in Wilson's place in Therein lies the fundamental problem with judging players by their RBI counts. A player with a. Player A just had a better lineup around him than Player B. In all likelihood, Player B played on a bad team while Player A played on a good team. To boot, a great triple-slash line isn't necessarily a prerequisite for having a high RBI count.

There have been plenty of cases in which players have managed to drive in runs despite having subpar years at the plate.

A couple years ago, Baseball-Reference. All but six of the 22 players on the list posted an OPS under. Four of the players on the list posted an OPS under. If you're looking for a very recent example of how a high RBI count can obscure what was otherwise a subpar season, look no further than Ryan Howard's season. He hit just. For that, he should have thanked Jimmy Rollins, Shane Victorino and Chase Utley for giving him so many chances to hit with runners on base.