RIP RBI

Whenever I talk baseball and stats come up, my big 3 are WAR, wOBA and UZR. Everything else just seems obsolete.

RBI may be something that can be misleading, but it’s not a stat. It’s a physical thing. It’s obviously the runers you’ve driven across the plate. As opposed to OPS or BIBP, it’s not a calculation, it’s a physical thing.

So I disagree. It’s not a stat. :-)

My main offense stats are HRs, RBIs, R, and SBs. They are here to stay for they correspond to moments of the game. Scorecards are filled out to them, fantasy teams on espn and yahoo are based on them, and have been on baseball cards people have collected since their childhoods.

Doubt these stats will ‘die’ in America’s consciousness.

Where does one find league averages?

It doesn’t give you a handle on the whole offensive value of a hitter and it is dependent on the guys getting on ahead of you, true. But I think it does work for middle-of-the-batting-order guys as a sort of shorthand to see how much, in a given year, a batter is getting positive results with runners in scoring position, which is important. Jason Bay, for example, has hit 3-4-5 all season long this year and he only has 30 RBI nearly halfway through the season. You can tell he’s having an off year just as well by looking at his RBI total as you can by looking at his slugging percentage. Even on a bad team where there aren’t as many scoring opportunities, a guy who bats in the middle of the order consistently all season long should put up at least a total of around 90 RBI

Like Seinfeld said though, yeah, clutch is bogus

but OBP and OPS can’t be referred to with catchy names like “ribeye steaks”

is that they rarely ever include that “league average” stat to make a useful comparison. This is standard in the scientific community where most results include p-values, confidence intervals, and standard deviations. If they started putting that in there, it makes the stats far more accessible.

While BA is still a decent stat, I’d much rather know about a guy’s OBP. That a guy is hitting .280 doesn’t really tell me much about the player, and too often I hear commentators quote a guy’s average as though that’s the end-all be-all.

It is funny that you posted this just now. On the radio here in DC I just heard the sports talk radio guys all agree that Adam Dunn is more deserving to be an all-Star than Ryan Zimmerman. Why? Homers and RBI. I was ready to tear my hair out (what’s left of it). Granted Dunn is having an outstanding season, and offensively is about even with Zimmerman – but come on.

In other words, in samples where you can still remember all the context. Otherwise, it’s pretty useless.

I think that the RBI stat has value when you look at it in the context of the contribution to a ballclub. Let’s say that a team scores 800 runs in one season. If Player X scores 120 runs and drives in 40 (15% and 5%), his contribution to the team’s production is getting on and around the bases, whereas if Player Y scores 10% of the team’s runs and drives in 15%, he’s more of a #5 hitter type.

You could derive this ’he’s a leadoff guy, he’s a masher’ info from slash lines, but at the end of the day the slash lines only indicate the expectancy of runs and not actual runs. Tracking this expectancy vs. actual relationship and looking for long-term patterns could be really valuable in explaining a player’s performance with respect to the rest of his team.

I agree that tracking RBI as an individual stat is pretty worthless.

Looking at RBI as a component of the old Runs Created stat (RC = R + RBI – HR) and comparing that to RAR could also provide some good insight into the actual vs. expected relationship. In theory, the two should converge over time, but they do not always. Looking at the cases where they do not might be a good indicator of clutchness if you normalize it over the total ballclub’s production ( i.e. % of team RC vs. % of team RAR).

It was said earlier in the thread that people like RBI because they come at exciting moment in the game. As such they seem really important.

Personally I don’t think they are cool unless you are gonna drive in more than 150 in a year. If you can drive in close to one run per game, you are having a fun year (even if you only have one grand-slam every fourth day.)

Regardless of how much I personally like RBI, I don’t think of them as a good way to judge the value of a player (like most raw numbers). There are better stats for such things.

RBI may not be dead, just frail and gimpy.

then it’s a pretty useless stat.

If it’s predicting future performance, RBIs are bad. If it’s determining a hitter’s talent level, also bad. But if it’s conjuring a sense of how often that one ballplayer did that awesome thing that made you jump up and down, it’s really good. This is an imprecise and not “useful” thing, of course, but it’s a real part of fandom. RBI’s are a part of the game.

I ended up with two extra tix. Buy me a beer and they’re yours. Text me: 718-644-1823