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Baseball Primer Newsblog— The Best News Links from the Baseball Newsstand
Monday, May 05, 2008
T.R. Sullivan’s blog entry from yesterday leads off with a lengthy paean to the RBI. And it got me thinking.
OBP seems to be the poster-stat for the ongoing stathead/traditionalist..."feud" is probably not the right word. Battle of paradigms? Or paradigae? Whatever the plural of paradigm is?
But even the anti-stathead types will acknowledge that OBP has some importance. OBP matters...there is just a differentiation of how important it is, how much weight should be put on it, compared to other stats.
But RBIs? The more extreme statheads call it a junk stat, irrelevant. The more extreme traditionalists use it to justify MVP and All Star votes. The RBI was at the heart of the very passionate disputes last season over the value of Sammy Sosa, which raged until late in the year when the Rangers just quit playing him. The RBI is a big part of the Jim Rice Hall of Fame debate, and the reason guys like Steve Garvey and Joe Carter have reputations that exceed their performances (or at least, their stathead-perceived performances).
Sullivan was one of the biggest Sosa fans last year—even naming him the club’s first half MVP—and leaned heavily on RBI totals in his support. So it isn’t surprising, I don’t think, that Sullivan is presenting an ardent defense of the RBI (in response to Bill James being critical of the RBI on 60 Minutes).
Thanks to Frank Bertaina, the Pride of the Ocean.
Repoz
Posted: May 05, 2008 at 11:31 AM | 5 comment(s)
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Actually, I get the impression that James loves to print RBI numbers; the New Historical Abstract has HR RBI BA for every player at the head of their entry.
Sullivan: and it's all about on-base percentage, secondary average, power speed number, OPS and Win Shares
Which are all goofy things we've never heard of. Again, it really is about OBP and OPS, without which you are not going to score runs; PSN is just a funny little stat that James never said "it was all about"; and Win Shares are just wins times three, at the team level, so it really is all about them too.
Sullivan: Michael Young has proven time and time again his ability to hit with runners in scoring position
He has, at that. Young is .340/.392/.489 with RISP, in 1,156 PAs (against .302/.348/.447 overall). But I don't know of any statheads who are moaning that Young isn't a decent hitter, especially for a shortstop. To argue that he's a magnificent run producer on the basis of his RBI totals would be odd, considering that his career high is 103 and he's never made an AL leaderboard in RBI. So I don't really see the point of bringing him up.
otherwise known as RnBI
"The reality is, the more you look at the data, the more you see that clutch hitting and run producing correlates with overall performance. If you can hit, then over time, you'll drive in runs if the opportunities are there. If you can't hit, you aren't going to drive in the runs, even if you are considered to be a run producer."
It seems to me that some great hitters: Carew, Boggs, Gwynn, Ichiro, Rose, etc., were never consistenly good RBI men. It might be a function of batting lineup location, but I think the missing component is POWER. For the players listed, their only decent RBI years were when they hit 15+ home runs.
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