Confusing Correlation and Causation, or Why We Don’t Use RBI
February 9, 2013 at 6:01 pm by Franklin Rabon under Atlanta Braves
One major project that we’re going to undertake this year at CAC is to have a sort of ‘educational’ series, to explain some of the concepts behind the way we analyze baseball. If you’ve done a lot of the ‘required reading’ in the links above, a lot of this will be redundant, however we are also going to go into some more detail in actual blog postings as well. For some of our more regular readers, you may find some parts of this series to be addressing issues you already understand, but hopefully even the most ardent readers may at least find a new way of thinking about topics you’re already familiar with.
Today we analyze that old chestnut of the traditional baseball writer/announcer, the RBI. Perhaps no single stat, outside of maybe pitcher wins, is more divisive between so called ‘sabermetricians’ and ‘traditional baseball media’ guys and gals. The RBI has long been a staple of backs of baseball cards, the line that pops up below a hitter when they come to the plate in a television broadcast and it’s one of the Triple Crown stats that Miguel Cabrera so famously lead the American League in last year.
Traditional media will expound upon the fact that knocking in runs is the whole point of offense (which is undeniably true) and thus the RBI should be king. In some ways that’s a simply compelling argument, so we better come strong if we’re going to challenge the throne of the RBI. Further, if you take any given list of the best hitters in the league, they’re inevitably amongst the higher RBI guys. Sure, there may be an exception here and there, but mostly they’re highly intertwined. Between 1919 and 1928, Babe Ruth was undeniably the best hitter in the game, in those 10 years, he lead the league in RBI 6 times, with two of the years he didn’t being years where he was injured. Further, one of the two non-injured years, he had 164 RBI, but finished second to teammate Lou Gherig’s 175. Surely, where there is smoke, there is fire. RBIs have to be important, right? They’re soooo highly linked with great hitters, and obviously the whole purpose that a batter comes to the plate is to cause his team to score runs, right?
Let’s take a detour for a second from baseball, and consider something that baseball players have a fondness for, red sportscars. Having worked in insurance before, I’m aware that statistically, red sportscars are substantially more likely to be involved in an accident than grey sportscars. The simple act of having red paint on your car can often cause your insurance premiums to rise in some states. So, let’s consider my hypothetical friend Bob. Bob has a red sportscar, but Bob, like many of us, doesn’t exactly want to be in a wreck, so Bob trades in his red sportscar for the same model black version. Now, most of us have enough sense to call Bob an idiot. However, Bob would object to you that STATISTICS PROVE that black sportscars get into fewer wrecks than red sportscars.
What we all sort of intuitively understand, but perhaps can’t explain is that our friend Bob has confused correlation (a statistical fact) with causation. Specifically in Bob’s case he’s confused the fact that more ‘flashy’ drivers tend to buy flashy red sportscars, and are more likely to drive ‘flashy’ and pass somebody in the suicide lane during rush hour to skirt through a changing light, and get into a wreck. The red paint and more accidents are both effects of the same root cause (wanting to be flashy while on the road), but Bob has assumed that the paint’s ability to absorb high frequency light waves is causing more accidents somehow.
Now, lets add one further analogy, and apply it to the sports world. Rushing yards and team victories. One common statistic that you’ll often hear NFL announcers spew out nearly every game is something along the lines of “Team X’s record when they rush for over 150 yards is (insert very good record), so obviously they need to make it a mission to get (running back’s name) his yards, no matter what!” Seems to make sense, when the team rushes for a lot of yards, they almost always win, so they should try to rush the ball a lot. How can you even argue that point? Well, what do teams do when they have sizable leads in the fourth quarter? They run the ball in order to drain the clock. What do teams do when they’re trailing in the fourth quarter? They pass the ball in order to score while taking as little time off the clock as possible. Thus, it’s often the case that winning is causing rushing yards, and losing is causing a lack of rushing yards, instead of the other way around. The team is running because they’re winning, not winning because they’re running.
Now, how does this apply to RBI? Well, let’s consider what it takes to get an RBI: Men on base and a solid hit, a homerun, or a walk with the bases loaded (obviously that’s simplified, but okay for our purposes here). In all cases, RBI are drastically increased if a batter has lots of men on base in front of him. In our first paragraph, we mentioned the astounding fact that Babe Ruth and Lou Gherig had 164 and 175 RBI respectively. How in the heck did that happen? Well, because the 1927 Yankees had a MIND BOGGLING SIX guys in the regular lineup with on base percentages over .380. Virtually every time Babe or Lou stepped to the plate they were hitting with 1-2 guys on base in front of them. Sure, they were fantastic hitters, but having the rest of your team get on base at nearly a .400 clip as a team makes you look much better in the RBI department.
Next, let’s consider how lineups are formed by managers. What do you want your first two guys to do? Get on base as ‘table setters’ and even perhaps use speed to get into scoring position for your 3-4-5 hitters. You want your #3 hitter to get on base a lot as well, in an ideal world. What do you want from your number 3,4,5 hitters? More than anything else you want them to just be flat out great hitters, so they can best take advantage of your 1,2,3 hitters being on base a lot. It’s the spot in the lineup and quality of the lineup in front of the hitter that’s causing the RBI mostly. He also happens to be a great hitter, but he’d be a great hitter regardless of what team or what spot in the batting order he hit in. Babe Ruth would have still been a great hitter if he was (obviously idiotically) forced to bat ninth. What we see is that being a great hitter is causing the batter to hit 3rd, 4th or 5th, but batting in those positions are actually what are causing the RBI more than anything else. It’s already a convoluted chain at that point, and the convolution is further compounded by the fact that the quality of the 1,2,3 hitters (which the batter getting the RBI has no control over whatsoever) drastically impacts RBI totals.
Well, so what? RBI are still often fairly well correlated with how good of a hitter a player is, who cares if the causal chain is murky at best? The reason is that RBI aren’t so much an inherently poor stat as much as a comparatively bad stat. That is, in a world where we only had RBI totals to judge hitter quality, things wouldn’t be hopeless. But we don’t just have RBI.
What was it that made Chipper Jones a great hitter? Was it that he had a lot of runs or RBI, or that he walked a lot, hit a lot of doubles and a lot of homeruns? Obviously the latter. We wouldn’t call Chipper Jones a poor hitter if he hit ninth and got much fewer runs and RBI, we’d call the manager an idiot who was mismanaging his talent. It’s walks, extra base hits and homeruns that matter, not runs and RBI. And luckily for us, we have those statistics. We can easily look them up. We can, with a little calculation even figure out the rates at which those outcomes occur.
Essentially, using RBI to judge hitter quality is like trying to read a book through a stained glass window from 10 feet away, when you could simply walk over, pick the book up and read it normally with minimal effort. Sure, you could maybe sorta make out the words of the book through the stained glass window, but why would you even try? Why not just walk over and pick up the book and read it normally? Looking at a hitters walks per plate appearance (BB/PA), singles per plate appearance (1B/PA), doubles and triples per plate appearance (XBH/PA) and homeruns per plate appearance (HR/PA) give you a razor sharp view of how well the player performed (though, due to ball in play luck, may not tell you exactly what his skill level is, but that topic is for another day, remember, results and skill aren’t exactly the same thing). Knowing that information, the only other thing RBI would tell you is whether or not the guys who hit in front of him were good at their jobs. Why would we judge a hitter’s quality based on the quality of other people who just happen to be on his team and just happen to bat in front of him. Only in a few very small cases is the hitter the manager, and never has he been the GM, so it seems quizzical at best to judge him on those merits. Thus, we see that RBI, while not totally awful, only serve to obscure a judgement that can otherwise be crystal clear. Using RBI is like trying to listen to your favorite song over a static-y radio station when you have the CD with the song on your CD player.
Finally, let’s talk briefly about weighted on base average (wOBA) and true average (TAv), two similar statistics pioneered by Tom Tango and the Baseball Prospectus staff, respectively. We just talked about what I often call the component stats of a hitter, in a very simplified form, what these stats do is that they take those component stats, and then weight them based on how historically important the various components are (ie how much more important is a double than a single, a triple than a double, a homerun than a triple, etc), then re-scale them to give a number that roughly corresponds with our notions of what a good OBP is (wOBA) or a good batting average is (TAv). True average also takes into account a few other aspects, like bunting, and hitting into double plays as well, but (for “saberists”, unsurprisingly) that seems to not have a huge impact, and the biggest difference is simply scaling to batting average v. scaling to OBP. If you really have to have a single number, these are great, as is the league and park adjusted version of wOBA, wRC+. (we go into more detail on these three statistics, and more in the sabermetric primer series of the podcast that will be released late tomorrow/early monday).
In conclusion, the problem with RBI is that it’s essentially a distorted reflection of a hitter being a good hitter, while we have ready access to stats that are much more informative, and less distorted by teammate quality and spot in the batting order. RBI is more of an effect of an effect (batting order position) of a cause (being a good hitter) plus teammate quality, it’s not the reason why a hitter is a good hitter. There simply isn’t a good reason why we should care about RBI, other than empty tradition. Tradition isn’t necessarily bad… if it makes sense, but in the case of RBI there just isn’t any sense in using it. When you use RBI as a measure of hitter worth, you’re confusing correlation with causation. How a hitter hits is the causation. It just happens that how many people are on base in front of him is sort of roughly correlated. You shouldn’t use ‘sort of roughly correlated’ stats when you have simpler stats representing the clear causation.
Loading ...
That Rabon guy is great! ALL HE DOES IS HIT!!!!!
Nice way to break down RBI without running it into the ground (which,I admit, I am guilty of doing at times when debating stats with old guys).
You should send Keith a copy of this article, seems right up his alley! ;-P
ha, one day I’ll have to publish the comments Keith made after his ban that the spam filter caught. They were pretty hilarious. We could call it “The Lost Keith” or something like that.
I read those comments and it seemed to me like they were so ridiculous as to be intentional. I wonder if “Keith” was making a poor attempt at satire?
I look forward to “the Lost Keith” if it should ever make its way to a post.
I thought that Keith might indeed just be satire… until I saw the massive efforts he made after the banning, on both here and facebook. He seemed to believe that he could bring the site down, but failed miserably, haha.
Let me add that the brief back and forth between you and Keith reminded me of the epic troll wars Peter used to get into on here. I miss his writing and hope he’s getting along well these days.
I have to say I prefer “friend” to “Keith” among the recent assailants, because self-importance is so sexy:
Ignoring me on this matter doesn’t make you correct.
When Ignorance Attacks: The Lost Keith Tapes
Huh?
you have to have read the last article, some guy named Keith came in ranting about the article and author were “idiots” and that Constanza gets overlooked for his offensive genius… go check it out.
Yea, I’m a new reader and don’t follow the Keith reference….
Great article though for the uninformed and sabermetric novices like myself (and evidently the misinformed traditionalists, ha)
nm, just read the previous comments made from the true “fan”, Keith
One reason why some people shouldn’t have opinions, or at least not voice them
This is a great article and I understand your argument but the general public understands RBI’s. It simplifies things and still ‘kind of’ gives an idea of how good a hitter is (ie., Babe Ruth). I enjoy the sabremetrics and understand them so I get where you’re coming from and I still think the RBI is a ‘decent’ measure to go by. What do you think should go in place of the RBI for the general public (on the tv screen)?
How can you read that article and then think that RBI tells you anything about how good a hitter is?
If we were stuck with just having a statistic that the public already understands to take the place of RBI, I guess I’d probably go with slugging percentage.
What about (OBP + ISO)…?
Wouldn’t that be one tick better than Slugging percentage?
well, I was using it as a subsitutute for RBI, which is a ‘purely slugging’ measure that people use to get a feel for ability to ‘knock in runs’.
If you’re going to use OPS (OBP + slugging), just go ahead and make the leap to wOBA.
How about batting average with men on base or slugging % with men on base or OPS with men on base or % of base runners driven in. I could go on. There are better ways to evaluate hitters than just plain rbi.
Here we get at the central claim of RBI proponents: yes, some guys have more runners on base, but some of them perform better in those situations (higher SLG, OBP, or whatever with runners on). The problem, as I understand it, is that it’s tough for a hitter to have enough PAs in those situations to prove that better performance is a repeatable skill until he’s been in the league so long that his skill is already on the decline. Better to go with overall career numbers than pretty subsets.
Just to be clear, I’m just trying to build on what Loron is saying.
Good post but as as an insurance underwriter, the info about red cars being more prone to accidents/violations is a myth.
red was moderately more prone, but only for sports cars, from the data tables we had. like a red jeep isn’t more pron the a black one, but a red mustang was slightly more prone than a white mustang. Most of the time it ended up not being a big enough difference to warrant actually charging different rates, but they were aware of it.
How about there are more boat accidents when ice cream sales increase. Proven data supports this. But they are both a result of summertime.
Time to ban ice cream so we can reduce those boat accidents.
I use a similar example in class, but it is the correlation between crime rate and ice cream sales – crime rate increases as ice cream sales increase. Again, the third variable is that both increase in summertime, but it is fun to play with falsely assuming causation. I mean, if I was a criminal, the first thing I would do after robbing somebody is go get some ice cream! Or maybe “Big Perm- I mean Worm” had a real impact on crime culture and most crime is now committed through Ice Cream truck syndicates! Or whose to say Ice Cream doesn’t contain a chemical that leads some to turn to thievery?
Seriously, though, I did appreciate the wOBA discussion. I like the idea of that stat, but never really understood what it was based on. Looking forward to the ignorance reducing series as I like stats, but don’t have time to figure out how baseball ones work on my own time.
Also, great articles lately on the website, and really quality discussion (in most cases). Looking forward to reading more.
Hank Aaron must of had some good players in front of him for a long time.
Nice work, interested in trying to sort out what is the best combination of stats to figure out the guy you don’t want to hit with runners on base.
the worst hitter in your lineup…. it’s really that simple.
as far as Hank is concerned, he DID have pretty good players in front of him for much of his career, AND he was one of the best hitters of all time. Remember he played for 23 years and had 2187 RBI’s, not even 100 a year avg….
2297 RBI’s…sorry typo
Lost in this debate is a nod to what RBI’s are good for: describing what happened in a particular game, or in a series (or some other small sample). This is the essence of the box score, retelling the story of the game in compact form for entertainment and reference.
The problem is not that RBI is a recorded statistic. It is extremely useful to those who want to refer to a game (whether it was played yesterday or 80 years ago) to know who got the big hits. They are some of the key facts around which to frame a story.
My guess is that this recap shorthand was the origin of the statistic–and only later (once they realized that they happened to have a record of them and could add them up) did people start using RBI’s in the silly way of measuring a player’s worth by them for “who’s better” arguments or contract negotiations.
It is the long-standing application of the statistic that is wrong-headed, or at least lazy, not the statistic itself. It is like RBI’s have been using the claw end of a hammer to drive the nail simply because it is part of the hammer.
I agree with most of this, though I think that today the RBI is outdated even for storytelling. Now, we have ready access to game stories at just the click of a button. In the old days, for any team other than the hometown paper’s team, most likely the only game story you could read was the box score.
Further, I think WPA has now surpassed RBI as the better storytelling stat. Today we can just look at a QPA graph, follow the movements and even hover the mouse over it to see what the event causing the shift was.
I’m with you as far as the ubiquity of game stories/video lessening the importance of a box score. But I think while WPA gives a great sense of the shifts of a game, the shifts in the game are not the whole story. I.e. it depends on what story you want to tell.
That being said I do like hovering my mouse over the line graph to see what caused such a massive swing.
“Hovering your mouse” is a felony in Georgia I think
[...] Sweet Spot sibling blog, Capitol Avenue Club, has a great post up explaining correlation versus causation and how it relates to baseball stats like RBI. Franklin Rabon (@fjrabon) did a great job with [...]
Is it not the case that some hitters perform relatively better or worse with runners on base? Is this not reflected in RBIs, but not in wOBA?
@Stuart if you are referring to “clutch”, there is very little evidence to suggest clutch hitting ability exists in baseball.
it is not the case. Check out Tom Tango’s work The Book for further evidence.
Which counting stat would you offer to the public instead of Rbis?
Also, do you think that someone’s ability to knock a player in (say with a sac fly or bunt) is worthy of a counting stat?
not much evidence that sac flies are a skill, and sac bunts aren’t worth very much unless it’s the pitcher doing it
and squeezes are so rare as to be statistically insignificant.
As far as pure counting stats, I suppose I would use homeruns, XBH or total bases. All are imperfect, but are much better than RBI.
Saberists need a good answer to this question,imo. We are too easy for people like Espn to ignore if we don’t have something to substitute.
In all honesty, practically any counting stat would be a good one besides RBI.
Take, for instance, the year that Bonds had that insane OBP of .600 or whatever. The fact that he was on base so much likely increased the number of RBI’s for whoever batted behind him. Do you even remember who that was? I don’t. Did that make him a better “hitter?” In no way does it do so.
The way I try to look at it is that “hitting” is a term related to individual skill. While the figure RBI is, by and large, one of a group’s skill.
So yeah, any of XBH, HRs, 1B/PA, Slugging, OBP are all better numbers than RBIs to judge one’s hitting skill.
I believe it was Jeff Kent, and there was even some sort of disagreement between Kent and the Giants because he thought he deserved to hit third in the lineup. I’m not extremely sure of all of this happening, I was probably like 11 when that happened. But it seems to be consistent, as Kent had 108 RBI that year and posted a 7.2 WAR. Whoever hit behind both Bonds and Kent would likely tell a better story, as he was sure to be much further behind in talent, but benefited in a big way from those two guys. Jeff Kent had a .368 OBP that year too.
Jeff Kent did hit 3rd for a lot of the season, and Bonds 4th. Reggie Sanders hit 5th, and missed a decent number of games (he only played in 140 games), and still had 85 RBI, despite a pretty bad (for a corner OF) triple slash of .250/.324/.455
Just looked it up, and they had about 5 other guys with ~70 or more RBI.
And that, as they say, is case in point gentlemen. 85 RBI’s does not necessarily translate into “good hitter,” even if you only look at the triple slash line.
I think you missed the point of what I was saying a bit. “XBH, HRs, 1B/PA, Slugging, OBP…” HRs are listed. Slugging and OBP are not counting stats.
That leaves XBH and 1B/PA. These are not stats that are easy for the average baseball watcher to get behind or connect with. That’s all I’m saying. I am commish of 2 fantasy leagues and there are no RBIs in them. But it takes awhile for most people to understand why and they don’t have something else to substitute.
Forget RBIs. It’s all about Game-Winning RBIs! Anyone else remember that 80s stat?
Game winning RBI have amongst the highest correlation of any stat to team wins! The R^2 is off the charts!
FOr some reason we won 0 games last year when scoring 0 runs. You think eventually we would pull one of those out.
I hope you’ll be tackling pitcher record as well to prove why a pitcher’s win/loss record is basically useless. I wish people would stop assigning records to individual players when it’s a TEAM GAME. God, every time I hear a broadcaster doing a football game referencing a QB’s record I just roll my eyes. The QB can’t do it by himself you idiots! He has 10 other guys out there helping him! I’d love to see how well a QB would do without an O-Line blocking for him. /rantover
Good job, Franklin. I think you did a very good job articulating why RBI is a dumb stat without just yelling, “RBI is a dumb stat!”
Useless is probably unfair. In the short term ,like one season? yeah it is, it doesn’t tell you the entire story of a pitcher’s production. But long term, a 250+ game winner IS going to be a pretty good pitcher.
But it shouldn’t be considered as one of the “key” numbers you look at when judging a pitchers skills.
It’s useless. A reliever’s height is more information than their W-L record.
And agreed, it takes a whole team to win in football, not just the QB. They get credit/blamed like a pitcher.
Well, what makes it useless is people start talking about how it’s the pitcher’s job to manage the game and in the end, the primary objective is to win the game so a pitcher’s record is the most important measure of a pitcher. And there’s enough idiots that make that kind of argument, many of them so-called experts (i.e. sportswriters), that it poisons the well.
You used the word “redundant” in consecutive sentences.
This notice brought to you by the Department of Redundancy Department.
fixed, thanks.
Give me RBI’s over OBS and OPP any day. You saber folks are nut jobs.
*P.S.: joking, don’t ban me
One point I often hear about RBI is that it’s an important stat because it shows that hitters can hit “when it counts.” The thing to note about this argument is that it does imply a causal relationship – having runners on bases causes a hitter to perform better. I’m not sure what the mechanism is supposed to be – change of plate approach? Adrenaline rush?.
If it’s supposed to be a plate approach thing, I’m not really inclined to agree, because if a player can change their plate approach with RISP and magically perform better, why don’t they use that plate approach all of the time? If it’s an adrenaline thing, it’s difficult to isolate and quantify adrenaline without having a heart-rate monitor or some absurd device on the player, but I suppose you could test if there is some general effect associated with RISP and attribute that to adrenaline (for example, for a given player, look at their wOBA with RISP vs. their wOBA with bases empty, run a t-test or regression if you really want to be statistically savvy, and then attribute the hypothetical elevated performance with RISP to adrenaline or “clutch” or however you want to explain it). Anyway, it’s an argument that I hear somewhat often, and I felt like it fit here because it’s an RBI defense that has a causal flavor to it. I’d be interested to hear other people’s thoughts.
the numbers say that given a large enough sample size a player’s numbers in “clutch” situations will end up around their normal career averages in ANY situation.
basically, good hitters are “clutch” because they are better at hitting than bad hitters are.
Clutch as a skill, is probably the biggest perpetrator of confirmation bias in all of baseball.
hitters do hit a *little* bit better in RISP situations as a whole, but it’s almost entirely a product of defenses and pitchers.
1) poor pitchers pitch with disproportionately more RISP, so they carry a disproportional weight in RISP situations. So, what ends up happening is that the average pitcher throwing in a RISP situation is worse than average pitchers overall.
2) When runners are on base, the infielders are often more compromised, either playing in more or having to keep runners closer to the bag, you can’t shift as much
3) pitchers are slightly less likely to throw hard breaking stuff with RISP out of fear of a wild pitch.
Also, one reason why hitters ‘hit’ better with RISP, as far as batting average is concerned is an accounting issue, because a lot of plate appearances that would otherwise be tallied as outs get discounted, because they’re labeled as ‘sacrifices’. Essentially a sac fly gives a hitter a free chance at a hit, if the outfielder catches it, it doesn’t count against him, if the outfielder doesn’t it still counts as a hit.
Nick, I tend to agree with you, but I have some reservations about this issue.
Here’s the problem. Let’s take clutch to mean performing well under high-pressure situations. You’d have to admit that in high pressure situations, a player is exposed to psychological and sympathetic/adrenergic effects that may alter his ability to perform.
You’d probably also have to admit that those same effects can cause a player to perform far worse than he would in lower pressure situations. Frequently, people call this “choking”.
What seems less plausible is that a player could somehow “hit better” when there’s more stress. Here’s the problem, though, and this is my main point.
What makes these situations most stressful is that they are relatively rare. In some way, all MLB at bats are stressful, but a player with 3000 AB’s may only get 50 post-season AB’s. In either case, to verify that a player is clutch or a choker, you need a large data set, and having lots of data makes those rare stressful situations less rare. If a player has 600 career playoff AB’s, then suddenly they’re not so high pressure. It’s a bit of a catch-22.
What you’re saying is reasonable. But, the studies have been done, and clutch-ness just doesn’t exist. It’s almost entirely a fabrication of small samples. Again, check out Tom Tango’s The Book if you’re interested in more on the topic.
I would counter that one of the things that makes good hitters ,good hitters is their ability to focus on the task at hand (hitting the baseball) regardless of the situation/stress level.
If you look at the post season and late/close data for guys with a lot of PA’s in those situations (say Chipper,Jeter,Pujols) you will see a lot of variance from one season to the next, but the overall avg tends to lie in that 10% on either side of career averages area.
Good hitters hit good
The idea of clutchness and choking has always bothered me. I was an engineer first and then became a physician, so quantitative science tends to hold sway with me, but I also understand the psychological aspects of performance and find them difficult to discount.
I find taking extreme cases helps conceptual understanding. Let’s do a thought experiment. Imagine 162 games were played, like a regular season and the two best played 1 game for all the marbles. The psychological effects of the importance of this single game would be significant and varied. Some players may be able to perform in this game just as if it is any other. Some might “try harder” and squeeze the bat more tightly and change their swings. Usually, deviating from motor programs developed over years of practice has a detrimental effect, so those players would tend to “choke”. Which players are psychologically resilient in this scenario does not necessarily correlate with their skill level.
Two things to note:
1) Regardless of the distribution of such psychological vulnerability or resilience in a population of players, it is impossible to understand the psyche yet deny that some variability exists.
2) It is impossible to statistically verify that this vulnerability exists in the highest pressure situations because doing so requires such large data sets that the situations *cease to be high pressure* once they are attainable. This is a restatement of my point from the prior post.
As I said, I am far more oriented toward quantitation myself. It is far more loathsome to me to hear someone say “gimme RBI’s any day” than to hear someone say “there’s no such thing as clutch”. But what I tend to notice in such philosophical dichotomies as this (and this includes our political system) is that to accept any assertion of the “opposition” is anathema. What I would like to propose is that we have some healthy understanding of the limits of our perspective.
Here’s a suggestion: “While it is reasonable and sensical that there is a psychological effect of pressure situations, it is difficult to verify quantitatively. Studies over large data sets have not supported the existence of ‘clutch’, though there may admittedly be some methodological difficulties in studying such a thing.”
sure, but that caveat is there for all statistically supported propositions. Essentially there is pretty decent evidence that clutchi-ness doesn’t exist, and there is ZERO evidence that it does. Nothing can ever be statistically verified, of course, 100%, that’s just the nature of statistical studies.
Franklin, all due respect, I’m not sure we’re on the same page. What I think you are hearing me say is something like “you can’t prove 100% clutch-ness doesn’t exist”. Obviously, nothing can be “proven” with statistics, but then I wouldn’t be saying anything at all.
I am saying *something* on the other hand, and it is more like this: It may be impossible to prove or disprove clutch because of the rare nature of “clutch” situations and the impossibility of generating large samples. That is a very different thing from what you are hearing.
Do you believe a player is capable of “choking”; i.e., failing to perform at his usual ability level in a short series because of associated pressure?
Is it enough evidence that a player may report “squeezing the bat more tightly” and “swinging for the fences” in such a situation? Or is the player just severely mistaken about his own psychology and stress response?
1) clutch situations aren’t particularly rare in the aggregate, unless you’re considering clutch to only be like bottom of the ninth in the world series.
2) One of the most repeatedly confirmed findings of psychology in the 21st century is how little we are aware of our mental states. Players report the baseball literally looking bigger when they’re “hot”, when study after study finds that A) doesn’t happen and B) hot streaks are nothing but random variation.
3) most baseball players that make it to the major leagues have already passed a level where they really choke under pressure. I’m sure it happens to lesser players, but if a guy couldn’t handle pressure, he probably would have never made it out of A ball. If anything the pressure is magnified in the minors, because failure to perform int eh minor leagues means you never make any real money, and are pretty poor. MLB players are a very special breed indeed. Remember how everybody thought A-Rod was a choker? And then he almost single handedly won the Yankees a championship? did he magically cure himself of choking for one year? There have been plenty of players who were labelled as chokers who then somehow magically became clutch, and plenty of players who were once thought of as clutch, that then became chokers. The more likely explanation is just random variation in performance. Players and the media don’t like to believe in random variation. They want a “reason”. If a player gets 4 hits in 10 world series at bats, he’s clutch, if he gets 2 he’s a choker. Players will also swear up and down that jumping over chalk lines affects their performance, do we trust them there too?
As a regular over at a Braves message board I’m lovin’ this article.
Please make next weeks topic about pitchers and wins.
Not a fan of “advanced metrics” at all, to put it mildly, but you make a good point about RBI. It is an interesting stat that, in conjunction with other numbers, can help explain a player’s level of performance, but it is highly dependent on other factors (or “causes,” as you put it). There certainly are stats that are more directly indicative of a player’s hitting ability than RBI.
That said, your repeated reference to correlation vs. causation is confusing, since the number of RBI a player is BOTH correlated to and caused by the player’s hitting. Your example (Bob and the sports cars) was a good one for purposes of showing the difference between correlation and causation. Another would be the reason that some people believe that diet soda causes cancer — because the creation and, thus, large increase in consumption of diet soda across the U.S. coincided with the rate of diagnosis of cancer. Of course, the rate of consumption of regular soda increased significantly over the same time period, as did the rates of many other things.
The relationship between hitting and RBI is not so poorly correlated. You are confusing bare correlation, such as in the sports car example, with something that has multiple causes. Even if every batter had the same chance of knocking in a run given the same situation (e.g., same runners on base, same pitcher, same park, etc.) — and we know that is not true — the batter would still be CAUSING the RBI. Sure, you may argue that runners being on base is the predominant cause, but it doesn’t reduce the relationship between a particular hitter and his RBI total to bare correlation. Even if the hitter’s hitting ability is a small cause of the RBI, it’s still a cause.
Please don’t think I’m missing your point. I get it, and there are likely better ways to convey whatever useful information about a player’s hitting ability may be conveyed through RBI. And people confusing correlation and causation is one of my pet peeves as well. But there’s still a difference between something being a minor (not predominant) cause and something being solely correlated.
I get what you’re saying, sure, there is a *little* causation when it comes to RBI and hitter quality, but it’s way less than spot in the batting order. In real life, you almost never run into two events that are correlated without a *little* causation. However, it’s instructive to know if it’s a major cause or a relatively minor issue. In this case, it’s a relatively minor issue. THe increased degree of correlation is because good hitters tend to hit 4th.
Let’s consider Freeman and Juan Francisco. Let’s imagine that this year Freeman hits 4th and Francisco 8th. Obviously Freeman is going to load up on RBI if that happens, hitting behind Heyward and Upton. However, if you were to flip the two, and have Francisco 4th and Freeman 8th, I can guarantee you that Francisco would have more RBI than Freeman would. That’s just how RBI work.
I was thinking that too. To build on that, I think it’s necessary to show that:
Freeman hitting cleanup=more RBI than Francisco hitting cleanup. While Freeman hitting 8th=less RBI than Francisco hitting cleanup.
Will be sending a link of this article to my little brother. Had an argument the other day over who the better hitter is between JHey and Freeman. He kept saying Freeman had more RBI’s…I responded by pointing out that he had more RBI’s b/c most of the season he hit right behind Prado and Heyward, who were always on base.
He’s a moron though, so he probably won’t read it and will continue his incorrect thinking. Oh well!
*Devil’s advocate*
I don’t usually think of RBI as a measure of ability or worth, because it’s clear: it’s almost entirely dependent on other players’ performance, just like runs.
RBI is useful as a snapshot measure of a player’s production in a given year, not his ability. I agree that it isn’t a good evaluation tool, but not all baseball stats are meant purely for player evaluation. There is some value in a stat like RBI because it illustrates his role/value on his team.
For the masses, it’s fine. For people like us, who look a lot deeper it’s clearly insufficient.
Great article.
Wondering if you could expand (maybe you are saving it for later articles, or can refer me to a good link) on how one determines, “how historically important the various components are”? How do you define “important”? That seems like the hardest part to me, and an area for significant controversy. I am not a “sabermetrics guy”, so I apologize if that is a dumb question, but I do understand statistics pretty well.
Important is essentially how likely a certain type of plate appearance outcome is to create an additional run. Studies have been done and shown how many additional runs the various types of outcomes contribute, and their varying levels are then built into wOBA.
how would you define “housewife” ;-)
what happens on twitter stays on twitter. Can’t be giving all these AJC wanderers who don’t follow me my golden nuggets.
Hey I didn’t give away anything!
Franklin,
Makes sense.
Obviously no single statistic is perfect, but do any of the advanced statistics take into account how a hitter might adjust his approach depending on his slot in the lineup? I’m thinking that a hitter leading off might try to get more hits and walks and reduce strikeouts, if he knows that there is some power behind him, whereas the same hitter, in the 3 or 4 slot might swing for more power, but also get more strikeouts. His hitting ability has not changed, but his approach has.
Again, thanks for teaching all us ignorant folks.
True Average takes those types of things into account. Surprisingly (or perhaps unsurprisingly) it doesn’t make that big of a difference.
You know how I know RBI’s are overrated? Jose Constanza only had 31 last year. ALL HE DOES IS HIT!
Is there somewhere I can get a sortable list of RBI opportunities to see who gets the most and does the most with them?
Thanks in advance,
Will.
While I don’t disagree with the comparison to car colors and insurance, I absolutely love the comparison to football (or any other sport) and winning stats.
You hear it all the time from talking heads on ESPN, commentators, reporters, DOB, etc… “Team X is an astounding 18-0 when scoring 100 runs!!” Well holy f’ing crap, ya think???
It’s funny how they never seem to mention that a team is 2-40 when scoring 1 run.
That entire situation relates perfectly to RBIs in that you will see stats that say PlayerX has 20 more RBIs when batting 4th than batting 6th. Once again, RBIs are simply more of a reflection of the ability of the batters in front of PlayerX than one of that player’s hitting ability.
Great post and articulation of RBI….if it makes sense to my wife and she enjoyed the read, then it’s well explained. I’m not too knowledgeable in the sabermetric world so I look forward to these posts! Great idea!
Saw this comment over at the Braves website.
“My only concern in pitching will be the situational scenarios that Chad Durbin filled last year. AKA: coming in after a pitcher has pitched 6 or 7 and has 110 pitches; with runners on, one or no outs, and him cleaning house. That will be a missed factor that remains to be seen if it can be filled.”
Man, that Durbin can just flat out pitch!!! Just like Constanza can flat out HIT!!
Great article and I hope to see more announcers going to other stats (but I doubt it happens). As opposed to saber stats, it’s a real easy stat to calculate and understand and that’s why it will continue to be used. However, managers for years (or forever) have always had their “best” hitters batting in position to get more RBIs. While the stat is not that important, it still shows who the manager thinks is his “best” hitter. Most of your batters high in RBIs are also the highest in saber stats, so the stat still has “some” value.
sure, that’s what I mean by ‘sorta kinda roughly correlated’. But the stat can be very dangerous as well. Consider Jeff Francouer’s 2006. He had 103 RBI while hitting .260/.293/.449. He hit 4th, 5th or 6th for the vast majority of the year. Considering that Chipper Jones was over .400 OBP in the 3 spot that year, and that Andruw Jones and Edgar Renteria were both over .360 OBP, Frenchy had a LOT of men on base in front of him.
This lead many to believe that Francouer was going to develop into a great offensive player. He had, after all, just knocked in over 100 RBI. However, look at his OPS+, a paltry 87 (which means he was 13 percent below league average).
The point is, RBI isn’t a bad stat when it’s confirming what we already know. I know Miguel Cabrera is a great hitter. I don’t need RBI to tell me that. It’s just when people use RBI the most, in the marginal cases like Jeff Francouer, that it fails us most miserably. If somebody is using RBI to make a point, then there’s a high chance that they’re wrong.
I get that RBI has been around forever and people are comfortable with it, but the point is simply that using RBI leads to one of three outcomes: 1) it confirms something you already knew (in which case it had no real value) 2) It points you in the right direction, but not as clearly as many other stats or 3) it in fact leads you to believe that Jeff Francouer is a better than average right fielder.
Haha, love that the third inevitable outcome of using RBI is thinking Jeff Francouer is good.
That’s ALWAYS the 3rd inevitable outcome!
You wake up with a “burning sensation” it’s one of 3 things:
1)That girl last week gave you the clap
2)you have a urinary tract infection
3)Jeff Francoeur is good
While there are many good points in this article, I still view RBI as a viable stat. Partially because it also relates to how good a TEAM is as opposed to an individual. Getting on base by any means possible and driving in runs in anyway possible is how you win games.
And while, yes, it doesn’t fully speak to a player’s talent as a hitter, having a guy who can consistently drive in runs is important. Freddie had 93 RBIs last year, and that was huge.
Driving in runs wins baseball games. There’s no way around that. And while there are many ways to do it, some ways cheaper than others, doing so correlates with wins. No one stat should be fully attributed to a player’s worth, and RBIs are no exception. But to completely disregard them as a stat is incorrect in my opinion because lots of RBIs equals lots of runs scored. Lots of runs scored= lots of wins.
If you’re evaluating teams, just used runs scored, which is way more simple, and relevant than RBI. Using RBI to evaluate team performance doesn’t really make sense either.
I would think RBI rate stats are somewhat valuable. Like the rate at which a guy drives in runners in scoring position, or gets the runner in from 3rd.
Surely some guys are better than others at those skills?
Of course things like contact rate (runner at 3rd less than 2 outs) and extra base hits (driving runners home) are probably better even in those cases, so who knows.