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April 28, 2004

Lies, Damned Lies

Making RBIs Useful

by Nate Silver

There isn't a whole hell of a lot to do in Lansing, Michigan. There aren't any mountains, and there isn't any seacoast. The nearest amusement park is 400 miles away. There's a minor league ball team there now, but there wasn't when I grew up. There's a college there--a big, state university--with lots of college parties, and lots of college girls, and a lot of kids from Lansing start behaving like college students long before they really should. But even those with precocious synapses manage to sneak in a few years of relative innocence before learning what sororities and beer bongs are, and my synapses were late to the party. There's a big city not too far away, but to paraphrase W.C. Fields, the prevailing sense that one has when one is in Detroit is that, all things considered, one would rather be in Lansing.

So what you do a lot is drive. You drive past the cow farms and the meadows and rolling hills or whatever the hell they're called in the TripTik and the dilapidated country town with the antique store that your mother likes so much. You drive with your dad in an American-made sedan and you listen to Ernie Harwell and the Tigers. You drive at 62 m.p.h. past a shuttered-up farmhouse with peeling gray paint and a half-working windmill, and Steve Balboni stands there like a house by the side of the road and watches Frank Tanana's fastball go by, or that's what Ernie tells you. You drive and you listen and you daydream and you talk about baseball.

I can distinctly remember, on one of those lazy summertime drives with my dad, talking to him about the relative merits of batting average and RBIs. Much better, we were agreed, to have a run producer like Kirk Gibson in your lineup than a batting average specialist like Wade Boggs. Baseball, after all, is won and lost with runs; an RBI, by definition, produces a run, while a base hit doesn't. Boggs had to rely on Jim Rice or Dwight Evans to drive him in, but Gibby got things done all by himself. We felt this to be a sophisticated and almost inscrutable line of argument. A few years later, we'd use the same reasoning to argue with anyone who would listen that Cecil Fielder had been robbed by Rickey Henderson in the MVP voting.

Nowadays, of course, my father and I have developed a more nuanced view of baseball and its statistics. We could tell you, for example, that some of the impetus behind our enthusiasm for the RBI was the result of the peculiar park effects of Tiger Stadium, which tended to increase run scoring and power categories, while depressing batting average. We could also tell you that our skepticism about batting average was correct: it is a relatively weak predictor of run scoring.

Surely, the RBI has its problems, and we could tell you that too. The usual modernist argument against the RBI, a case that Dayn Perry makes eloquently, is that it's extremely dependent upon a player's context. All else being equal, a hitter who has Derek Jeter and Gary Sheffield hitting immediately in front of him is going to have more RBIs than a hitter who is batting behind Jack Wilson and Rob Mackowiak, simply because the former pairing will be on base so much more frequently.

But what if we could remove these sorts of considerations from the equation? Would the RBI then become useful? I asked Keith Woolner to provide me with the following information for each major league hitter in 2003: