Chasing Ribbies

Joe Mauer is a solid run producer despite low home run totals.

I want to share three thoughts and one piece of trivia on the subject of runs batted in. Being one fifth or your offensive scoring in standard 5×5 leagues, it’s important that you don’t just scan down RBI leaders sheets, but instead you should give real thought to the factors behind ribbies. 3 thoughts:

Opportunities

Runs batted in is rightly criticized as a statistic because it measures opportunity as much as it measures performance. It can be a tough category to prepare for in fantasy baseball. A RBI depends as much on the context as it does the skill of the hitter. Giancarlo Stanton will hit a lot of solo home runs, getting one RBI, an opportunity missed for more because his teammates won’t be skilled in getting on base in front of him.

But can you draft players that make the most out of the opportunities they have? Said another way, we know the players who knocked in the most runs last year, but just how many should be have expected they knock in, considering the skill of their teammates in being on base for them?

The top two players last year were Edwin Encarnacion and Josh Hamilton. E5 should been expected to get just 61 RBI, but knocked in 107, good for a 1.77 expected to actual ratio. Hamilton was expected for 73, but hit 127. That’s good for a 1.74 ratio.

Thanks to the work of Jason Mitchell and the Baseball Think Factory, we know that in addition to Hamilton and E5, you can count on David Ortiz, Evan Longoria, Miguel Cabrera, Jose Bautista, Ryan Braun, Giancarlo Stanton, Alfonso Soriano, Garrett Jones, Alex Gordon and Mike Trout to be near the best at knocking in guys above and beyond what should be expected of them. (Interestingly, had E5 been given the same opportunities as Miggy, he would’ve knocked in 153 runs, while Miggy would’ve tallied just 97 RBI if he had E5’s opportunities. I’m not saying all else is equal, just further illustrating that opportunity matters.)

Inversely, Hunter Pence, Starlin Castro, Adrian Beltre and Hanley Ramirez had solid RBI totals in 2012, but had more blatant opportunity in front of them. Had they hit with the efficiency of E5 their RBI totals would’ve been significantly higher and Starlin Castro was the worst at squandering opportunities.

The takeaway is that some players excel when given the opportunity, while others are less impressive in the same context.

Extra Base Hitters

Often your home run hitters are known as the league’s best RBI guys and this is usually true. But you can tally RBI without hitting homers – it’s all in the extra base hits. Alex Gordon spent the majority of 2012 in the leadoff position, yet he knocked in 72 runners, despite hitting only 14 home runs. That was possible because he had over 50 doubles.

Joe Mauer is similar in that he only hit 10 homers, but he knocked in 85 runs. Martin Prado, Miguel Montero, Starlin Castro, Jason Kipnis, Shin-Soo Choo, Brandon Phillips, and Torii Hunter also posted solid RBI totals despite a lack of serious home runs.  But the real standout in this category is Adrian Gonzalez with 108 RBI despite just 18 home runs.

Be familiar with the doubles leader board because they’ll give you an uptick in RBI, despite potentially hitting in a poor lineup spot for RBI production.

RBI Formula

Speaking of lineup spots, which are the best producers? Well, it’s the middle of the order guys, which is logical as they are the team’s best hitters. This is especially true if the team has some solid on base guys setting the table.

I’ll take this a step forward though and give you a formula you can use to get a rough projection of RBI production, but you’ll need the team’s OBP (Baseball-Reference can give you this) and the individual’s Total Bases (double, triples, etc.).

"3 – 4 – 5 Hitters:(0.7 x Games Played x Team OBP) + (0.3 x Total Bases) + (0.275 x HR) – (0.2 x GP)6 – 7 – 8 Hitters:(0.6 x Games Played x Team OBP) + (0.27 x Total Bases) + (0.25 x HR) – (0.2 x GP)9 – 1 – 2 Hitters:(0.55 x Games Played x Team OBP) + (0.24 x Total Bases) + (0.225 x HR) – (0.2 x GP)"

Obviously, there is no need to go to this amount of trouble just to project RBI, but just reading through this simple formula gives you a sense of the factors at play when talking RBI. How well the team gets on base matters, an individual player’s extra base hits matter, as does position in the lineup. But you could apply this formula at the All Star break and you can get an idea if a player’s second half should track higher or lower in terms of RBI.

Now the trivia.

RBI is short for runs batted in so it’s a pet peeve of many to see it pluralized as RBIs or RBI’s, as that would to them be redundant as runs is already plural. But both RBI and RBIs is considered acceptable, pet peeve or not.