2014’s King Of Driving In Runners

On Sunday, Adrian Gonzalez had two hits, including his 27th homer of the season, and drove in three runs in the Dodgers’ season-ending 10-5 win over Colorado. Already all but guaranteed to lead the NL in runs batted in, the three he brought in yesterday ensured that he’d top Mike Trout and lead all of baseball for RBI for the first time.

Before you wonder why FanGraphs is suddenly acting as though RBI is a real stat that means anything, worry not. I think it’s useless. You, most likely, do too, and we all already know why, because it’s largely based on opportunity and teammate performance, and that adds far too much noise to consider it useful as an individual stat. If you’re not an everyday player, you won’t have an impressive RBI total. If your teammates don’t get on base ahead of you, you won’t have enough chances to rack up those RBIs. Relying on it as an indicator of talent can cause more harm than good, too, like when Brandon Phillips was seen as having a great 2013 last year in the midst of his decline because the Reds offense was lucky enough to have Shin-Soo Choo leading off rather than Drew Stubbs (2012) or Billy Hamilton (2014).

It’s barely been one paragraph, and I’ve already probably spent far too much time even talking about why this is a flawed stat. You already know this. Unfortunately, we can probably agree that the majority of general baseball fans don’t quite agree with that, if only based on how many references to “RBI” I saw regarding Gonzalez on Twitter. Gonzalez himself, more understandably, took note as well:

@THEREAL_DV thanks Vas!

— Adrián González OLY (@Adrian_ElTitan) September 29, 2014

The RBI, of course, is all about context. Now, a lot of our stats — FIP, WAR, Base Runs, etc. — do their best to remove context from the measurements, and for good reason. You want to see what a player did with only the things they can control, and when evaluating hitting production, it’s ridiculous to think that a bloop single with a few men on is better than a scorched line drive double with the bases empty. For many of the same reasons that pitcher wins are no longer relevant, players shouldn’t be judged based on things they have no control over, and “having players get on base while you’re in the dugout” seems like the ultimate lack of control.

That being said, we’re also aware that when it comes to the scoreboard, context is important. It might not be a skill to get that bloop that drives those runners in, but it doesn’t make the runs on the board count any less. A sacrifice fly generally isn’t really any different from the hundreds of other flyouts a hitter will have, but if his teammates happened to do well right before it, it’s still a run you didn’t have before. You aren’t really going to spend a winter building a team based on those kinds of things; you will be happy if and when they happen in the summer.

So with that in mind, we can easily do better than the RBI. One way is to head over to Baseball-Reference and look at their situational hitting leaderboards, which includes Base Runner Scored percentage, or BRS%. That’s simply taking the number of runners a hitter has driven home and dividing it by the number of runners on base, which accounts for opportunities. Since the end result is a percentage, it doesn’t penalize part-time players, either, and since we’re trying to get to the heart of what RBI purports to do, which is show a hitter’s success at driving in his teammates, that BRS% excludes home runs works perfectly.

By setting a minimum of 250 plate appearances, we get 330 players, and we can see who really was the king of bringing their teammates home this year, no longer depending on opportunities and teammate performance, with the exception of runner speed and third base coach aggressiveness. The leader is…

Name	Tm	PA	BR	BRS	BRS%
Miguel Cabrera	DET	681	371	88	24%
Ryan Braun	MIL	576	306	65	21%
Devin Mesoraco	CIN	436	273	57	21%
Mark Trumbo	ARI	359	243	51	21%
Adrian Gonzalez	LAD	658	461	95	21%
Michael Brantley	CLE	676	388	78	20%
Robinson Cano	SEA	662	352	70	20%
Jose Abreu	CHW	622	363	73	20%
Justin Turner	LAD	321	185	37	20%
Adam Lind	TOR	315	183	36	20%
Lyle Overbay	MIL	295	157	32	20%

That’s kind of a fun list. You have a few longtime stars there in Cabrera, Braun, Cano and Gonzalez, and that’s not surprising, because quality hitters hit with quality across all situations. You have some breakout seasons from Mesoraco and Brantley. Abreu is the obvious AL Rookie of the Year and the newest star slugger in the game. Turner is a role player having an absolutely inexplicable great season, fueled in large part by BABIP. Overbay, a past-his-prime veteran platoon guy, is a surprising entry. Trumbo’s year has been an injury-plagued disaster, except for the part where he’s actually helped create some run value.

Gonzalez shows up highly on that list, as you’d expect from the man who is being hailed as the sport’s RBI leader. But has he really done anything that differently this year?

2012: 21% (438 BR)
2013: 20% (418 BR)
2014: 21% (461 BR)

He’s done what he’s always done. His teammates just made him look a lot better while doing it.

Really, though that Cabrera is on top here is fascinating, because he’s been seen as having had something of a down season — if it sounds completely ridiculous to say that a 147 wRC+ is a “down year,” it is, but only compared to his previous greatness — and because RBI was such a big part of his 2012 MVP award, which was fueled by the Triple Crown. It wasn’t fun to argue against the Triple Crown that year, because it hadn’t been done in decades, but it was pretty hard to ignore that that Trout hit leadoff in every single game of that season, and thus was guaranteed to have at least one plate appearance every game with no runners on base. It wasn’t a fair fight, is the point, and while Trout’s 111 RBI this year are 28 more than he had in 2012, he’s also had 89 more runners around to drive in, since he’s now hitting second.

Cabrera just completed one of the lowest full-season RBI totals of his career, in large part because he hit the fewest full-season home runs of any year of his career, with 25 dropping from 44 in both 2012 and 2013. By that measure, he’s lost his magic when it comes to being a run producer. By another, much better measure, he just finished the best full-season BRS% year he’s ever had:

2004: 17%
2005: 17%
2006: 23%
2007: 20%
2008: 19%
2009: 16%
2010: 19%
2011: 17%
2012: 22%
2013: 21%
2014: 24%

The league average generally hovers at around 14%, and so Cabrera has outperformed that every year — again, unsurprisingly, because he’s an elite hitter who outperforms every league average hitting stat every year, and that’s basically the point. As much as we hear about “productive outs” and “clutch hitting,” it simply comes down to that fact. If you’re a great hitter, you’re generally going to be a great hitter no matter whether your teammates get their job done or not. It’s why we try to cut through the noise of team-based stats when trying to evaluate an individual.

For the first time since 2008, Cabrera seems like he might finish a season outside the Top 5 in the American League MVP voting. For the first time ever, he’s led baseball in non-HR runners driven home. I don’t think we needed another way to say how great Cabrera really is. But man, is he ever great.