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Written by Bill
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Sunday, 24 May 2009 06:00 |
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Just a few follow-up things on yesterday's super monster baseball nerd post:
tHeMARksMiTh almost immediately had a response for me back at his own site. It's excellent and thoughtful, again, and there's an interesting discussion that goes on in the comments, under which I put my own reaction to it. Go there and read it yourself, but in a nutshell, Mark wonders whether there are things that we still need to consider that are more difficult or perhaps impossible to quantify -- leadership, intimidation, distracting a pitcher with the threat to steal, and so on. I think those things, or many of them, absolutely do exist and have an effect on the game, but that while sabermetricians don't have any way of measuring those things, it's important to note that batting average, RBI and fielding percentage don't measure these things either. So I don't see how these things bolster the anti-saber crowd's arguments...except that Joe Morgan and Steve Phillips keep telling us that they do.
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In the comments to yesterday's post, Ron from Baseball Over Here pointed me toward something he wrote about six months ago in defense of the RBI, and again, I think this is excellent and definitely worth a read.
Ron starts by showing that the list of career leaders in RBI is populated almost exclusively by great players. The conclusion seems to be (correct me if I'm wrong, Ron) that RBI must be measuring something useful, if only great players are getting a lot of them.
A potential problem with that is that you need to pretty much be a great player to be among the all-time leaders in any stat. The top 14 in At-Bats, which doesn't measure anything but one's propensity for being penciled into the lineup and not walking or sacrificing, are all in or surely headed to the Hall [edit: or are Pete Rose]; you can draw your own conclusions about Raffy at #15, but then the next ten after him are already in too (though some you could argue about -- Maranville, Aparicio). The top three batters in career strikeouts are Reggie, Slammin' Sammy and Thome; the top six pitchers in career losses are all in the Hall. So by itself, I'm not sure that that line of thinking gets us very far.
I'll definitely accept the general premise, though. You can even just limit it to a single season. There are definitely a few exceptions (Jose Guillen and Emil Brown were mentioned in the comments to Ron's piece), but really, if you've got 100 or even 80 or 90 RBI, the odds are very good that you were an excellent hitter (for power, at least) within that season. The problem is that that extremely high-level thing is pretty much all it does; if dude A has 100 RBI and dude B has 120, we have no better idea who was the better player with that info than we had without it.
Ron is all over that. He recognizes that RBI totals are a poor way to decide the MVP race, for instance. But he concludes that RBI is a good stat anyway, because they tell us something important--how many times the guy did something that brought a run home. He has a lot of interesting analysis about how many different ways a run scores, and basically shows that, you know, RBI are usually pretty necessary to scoring runs most of the time.
But I'm not sure I understand why that makes the RBI stat itself important. We already know what a player can do that tends to lead to a run scoring (in rapidly descending order: (1) get on base; (2) hit with power; (3) run the bases well). We can track how well he does these things and get a pretty good sense of how good he is, all else being equal, at producing runs. If we already know these things, what does it add to consider RBI themselves, knowing as we do that so much of what we're really measuring is the opportunities that that player's teammates created for him?
I'm really asking. From where I'm sitting, it looks like RBI themselves are superfluous when you already have all the other, non-context-dependent stats that make good RBI guys good RBI guys. I'm certainly open to discussion and new ideas on this....I'm just not seeing it right now.
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