Clayton Kershaw

[bravos4evr]

Originally Posted by KCRfan1

So BA and RBI's don't have value?

not really. Not for what people have traditionally used them for (individual hitter production)

Let's look at the limitations of batting avg:

it doesn't tell us how good a player is at getting on base

it doesn't tell us the type of hits they got thus creating the illusion that a .300 hitter is more productive than a .275 hitter (and this may or may not be true but avg alone doesn't tell us this) OPS (which combines OBP and SLG) does a better job, wOBA and wRC+ are better than that.

I mean, would you rather have Ichiro and his career .314 avg or Jim Thome and his career .276 avg?


RBI's are so contingent on the OBP ability of player's in front of a player (and/or the quality of the team's offense) rather than the player himself. (as the player has no control of who is on base when he comes to the plate, nor does the presence of baserunners impact his ability to hit) there is a small variation in hit sequencing with RISP, but it's within the noise range.

Let us look at a couple of examples of why RBI's doesn't tell us much about player production: Ryan Howard in 2014 had 95 RBI's (18th in MLB) yet his slash line was .223/.310/.380 (terrible) his wRC+ was 93 (7% belw avg)and his WAR was -0.4

also in 2014 Kyle Seager had 96 RBI's had a slash line of .268/.334/.454 with a wRC+ of 127 (27% above avg) and a WAR of 5.5

two guys, same season nearly identical RBI's in the same amount of games yet their actual hitting production that year couldn't be more different.