The end of RBIs?

I consider myself a saberhead, and I totally accept that players can perform well in clutch situations. My beef is that "clutch" is not a skill; not something that can be learned or taught or even duplicated.

 

It *really* hurts people's feelings that statistical analysis is proving that they can't really just watch baseball games and makes accurate judgments. That's pretty much where all the resistance comes from.

 

Pretty much all baseball games are decided by clutch hitting.

It's just that the hitters who are most likely to hit in the clutch are the ones who are good hitters. There's no special ability to hit better in certain situations.

 

Yeah. Or, if you want to hedge an argument - If there is an ability to hit in clutch situations, the advantage is so small and the chances so fleeting that it's not worth a general manager paying for it.

As far as RBIs go, I agree with what (I believe it was him) Dick said: They're useful if you're writing a game story, to tell the story of the game and who did what. In the context of accurately evaluating an individual player and what they'll do in the future though, it's not so useful. Like pitcher wins, it's a stat that relies almost as much on your teammates as it does your own performance.

 

Uggg.

RBIs are a perfectly good stat. They tell you one thing really, really well -- better than any other stat: How many runs a dude drove in.

They're only sub-standard when used to try to gauge how good a hitter is. That isn't to say they're horrible at it -- there's a decent correlation between RBIs and overall hitting prowess. It's just that there are other stats that are much better correlated because they take teammates out of the equation.

 

Well-said. RBIs are certainly interesting, even if they aren't particularly predictive or evaluative.

 

Rick, the statement that one cannot make accurate judgments about baseball by watching baseball games is, beyond doubt, the most ridiculous assertion I have ever seen on this board outside the politics threads. Among other things, it strongly implies that umpires serve no useful function. Thousands of people have been employed in baseball for over a hundred years and are still employed to do nothing but look at ballgames and make judgments.
Is there a radio booth where announcers look at a pitch and go, "we'll tell you if it was a slider or fast ball after I run my iPhone app on pitches"?

 

Sorry if this is redundant...I jumped from page 1 to page 3 to make a point.

The point that RBIs are irrelevant because they are influenced by the rest of the team is pointless. All statistics in a team game are influenced by the rest of the team, including OPS. Are you being pitched to? Are there runners on base or are you coming up with the bases empty? Is the guy batting behind you worth a shit?

All of those things are external factors than influence all stats. Just like in basketball. I covered a guy who was an unbelievable 3-point shooter, something like 45 percent. But this year, they expanded his role from a spot-up shooter to a guy they'd run off screens and basically run offense through him. Now he's shooting 37 percent from 3, or somewhere thereabouts. Is he a worse shooter? No. He's just more aggressive because he's being asked to be more aggressive.

 

Those people draw bad conclusions. Often.

The human brain is not wired to see the subtle distinctions between baseball players over the course of dozens of games.

Statistical studies have pinpointed the difference between hitting in front of a good or bad hitter. It's pretty negligible, where hitting in front of a bad hitter will slightly raise your OBP and slightly lower your SLG.

 

Rick, there are subtle distinctions between SOME baseball players, and statistics help discriminate between them. For most players, statistics are a substitute for watching them, because very few of us can watch all baseball games being played simultaneously, even MLB Network studio show producers. But if were to watch, say every game Roy Halladay pitched last year, we'd know he was a pretty good pitcher if we never glanced at a box score of those games.
And it gets easier to discriminate between players the further down the ladder you go. Any reasonably experienced fan such as yourself can go to a Triple or Double A game and identify which players are likely to make the majors with almost complete accuracy and be right far more often than not on how they'll do when they get there just by watching them play the game.
I remember watching Alfonso Soriano play in Triple A when he was the Yanks' lead prospect. The sound of his bat hitting the ball was twice as loud as it was for any other hitter in the game. No stats needed for that.

 

If his stats can't measure it, it doesn't exist in Rick's world. Don't you know that by now, Michael?

 

So if stats can always tell us the subtle distinctions, and eyes can sometimes but are more prone to mistake, what do we need the eyes for?