RBIculous

"Isn't a hitter's role to knock in runs?" asked Paul from Oakland, defending Ryan Howard's MVP candidacy after last season.

The AP writeup of yesterday's Rangers' 3-0 whitewashing of the Angels supports this view. In a two-sentence summary it notes that David Murphy's sacrifice fly helped Texas extend a seven-game winning streak.

The Texas left-fielder certainly broke a scoreless tie in the 7th inning with his fly ball. For that, the record books will wink at the out he produced. That's probably a bit of charity in the first place. I'm a lot more impressed with the Hank Blalock double that made the run possible. According to Paul and the summary writer, it's the RBI that counts.

Love of the RBI is derived from the quaint notion that this statistic probably came the closest to approximating who got the big hit in the key situation the most. After a few years of use, we stopped paying attention to the modifiers and simply equated RBI with clutch hitting.

In fact, modern analysis has shown this to be utter nonsense. RBIs occur at the intersection of opportunity and performance -- performance that's easily calculable in other, better, ways. David Murphy got credit for an RBI when all he did was avoid making a bad out.

By the way, in the 8th inning, Omar Vizquel tripled and scored the almost-as-important second run. That second run, whose existance David Murphy made less likely when he failed to reach base safely, increased the Rangers' chances of winning about half as much as the first. That's why Hank and Omar deserve the bulk of the offensive credit (granting in advance that Scott Feldman and a triumverate of relievers really won the game) and not David Murphy, RBI not withstanding.

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