I've covered the MVP races and the AL Cy Young, but the NL Cy Young is a whole other kettle of fish. That's because Tim Lincecum and Chris Carpenter are in a virtual dead heat, with Dan Haren, pitching in the thin desert air, hot on their heels. I'll take that one up after the season.
Most of the comments on these posts come off-blog, but this one is worth addressing. Mark from New York asks, "if on-base percentage is so superior to batting average, why do you often reference a player's batting average?"
The traditional measures -- triple crown stats for hitters, W-L and ERA for starting pitchers and saves for relievers -- run the gamut from virtually meaningless (RBI, pitcher wins) to pretty illuminating (ERA). Home runs and batting average are somewhere in between and suffer from the same weakness: they propose to measure things that are more fully measured in another way.
Home runs tell us something about a hitter's power, but they don't account for doubles and triples, which slugging average does. Batting average gives us a glimpse of a player's out-avoiding ability, but not as complete a view as on-base percentage, which includes walks and HBP.
So here's how batting average is important: there is no way to hit .375 and not be a good on-base guy. Even a free swinger who accepts only the occasional free pass grudgingly is going to sport a nifty OBP if he's batting .375, and it's virtually impossible to hit .375 without being a selective hitter.
Conversely, no .213 hitter would make a productive lead-off batter, even if he collects walks like they're pennies. OBP is largely dependent on batting average, so I often use the BA shorthand to denote a player's ability to reach base safely.
RBIs are different. A bad hitter can collect 80 RBI if he plays a lot and bats in the middle of a prodigious order. It happens all the time. David Ortiz (.233/.325/.447) has 84 RBI already. Brandon Inge, who I don't believe has hit safely the entire second half of the season, is now at .235/.322/.424, but with 76 RBI. It's been a miserable year for Jimmy Rollins (.247/.291/.414), but he's knocked in 71. There are better examples from previous years, but you get the point. RBIs are a stew of hitting and opportunity, and if you gets lots of opportunities, you don't need much hitting.
A great example on the other side of the coin is Kirk Gibson's magical 1988 for the Dodgers. The league MVP that year (one of the most astute selections ever by the writers, in my opinion), Gibson hit .290/.377/.483, stole 31 of 35 bases and played a spectacular left field in a ball park that didn't give up hits without a fight. He paced his team in homers, doubles, walks, HBP, runs and of course OBP and SA. He also led the league in intentional walks, which tells you something about how other teams feared him.
And he knocked in 76 runs. Was Gibson not clutch? Did you not watch the ninth inning of Game 1 of the World Series that year, or did you just not believe what you just saw? Gibson was the acknowledged leader of the team, the hardscrabble Mr. Hustle who was unfazed by the situation or the size of the human being, or the wall, that was bearing down on him.
No, Gibson knocked in 76 runs because no one was ever on base when he came to bat. The team won with pitching, defense, and Gibson, posting a putrid team batting line of .248/.305/.352 . Most of Gibby's 25 long balls were solo shots because leadoff speedster Steve Sax and centerfielder John Shelby were busy making outs 68% of the time. We know Gibson had a great year, no thanks to RBIs.
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