A Steaming Pile of RBIs: #4 In A Series

Which player had a better year with the stick in 1997?

Joe Carter , 102 RBI
Jim Edmonds, 80 RBI

If you're a baseball writer, or a Phillies fan from Oakland, you'll take Carter's 102 runs driven in because the job of a batter is to knock in runs. Whenever you're in the company of baseball writers, get out the hip waders because you're in a big, steaming pile of buffalo poo.

It's not that Carter was a disaster for the Blue Jays that year. Oh wait, yes it is. In fact, with Carter's excerable .284 on base percentage, the BJs could have saved millions and produced more runs by replacing their aging slugger with whatever detritus was hanging around Triple-A. With just 40 walks and 12 double plays grounded into, Carter consumed 474 precious outs and graded out under AAA replacement level.

So how did he accumulate 102 RBI? Among those many occasions when his teammates filled up the bases for him, he smacked 55 extra base hits. Because RBIs are a team event -- you can't knock in a runner who's not there -- they don't reflect quality as much as opportunity.

Okay, hypothetical Oakland resident, I hear your objections: 1. You can knock in a runner who's not there with a home run. 2. RBIs show that you come through in the clutch.

Let me pause briefly on item #2 and simply say we've returned to the big pile of buffalo poo. Sabermetric studies comparing players of roughly equal production (on base plus slugging) but wildly differing RBI totals have found that RBI opportunities account for nearly the entire explanation and RBI efficiency explains somewhere between nothing and a negligible amount.

As for the self-made RBI -- the dinger -- even an anti-social, contrarian stathead geek will acknowledge that a home run is the double-fudge brownie ice cream, the Anne Hathaway, the royal flush, of every at bat. But we have other ways to account for it without subjecting the analysis of individual players to the bias of their teammates' success or failure. That's why my cat is named Tater, not Ribbie.

(As for Jim Edmonds, his .368/.500 performance added roughly four wins to the Angels even before accounting for the yawning chasm between his defense in the toughest outfield position versus Carter's weak glovework in the easiest. It would not be an exaggeration to say that Edmonds was twice the player Joe Carter was that year.)

The moral of the story is that we value RBIs because we count them, and we count RBIs mainly because we grew up counting them. But we grew up watching black and white TVs, listening to vinyl records and believing that we could feed the poor by taxing the rich into oblivion. It's time to update our understanding of the game.