We're about a quarter of the way through the 2011 season. Here's a look at the impending free agent leaderboards.
Batting average
- Lance Berkman – .347
- Jason Kubel – .331
- Jamey Carroll – .319
- Jose Reyes – .310
- Jeff Francoeur – .295
On-base percentage
- Lance Berkman – .434
- Jason Kubel – .387
- Jamey Carroll – .380
- David Ortiz – .377
- Carlos Beltran – .373
Slugging percentage
- Lance Berkman – .694
- Carlos Beltran – .569
- Jeff Francoeur – .550
- Prince Fielder – .540
- David Ortiz – .504
Walk rate
- Carlos Pena – 17.5%
- Kosuke Fukudome – 16.4%
- J.D. Drew – 16.3%
- Jonny Gomes – 15.7%
- Lance Berkman - 14.5%
wOBA
- Lance Berkman - .463
- Carlos Beltran – .402
- Jeff Francoeur – .390
- Prince Fielder – .390
- Kosuke Fukudome – .387
Home runs
1. Lance Berkman – 11
2. Prince Fielder – 9
3. Carlos Beltran, Jeff Francoeur – 8
5. David Ortiz, Rod Barajas, Albert Pujols – 7
Rod the Bod has 7 dingers already?
Orlando Hudson is not an impending free agent.
My bad
No worries, my friend.
RBI is finally dead and gone. some day we’ll be able to skip batting average on lists like these, too
Since I had OBP in there, I probably could have.
yeah, it really is an annoyance that scoreboards at all 30 stadiums still have that pesky run column determining who wins the game
for a single game it’s good to count basic stats like RBI’s but this is a list of how good these guys have been throughout the season so far. RBI is pointless on a list like that. It’s about value to a team, and in the long run RBI doesn’t mean anything when it comes to value.
There are places in the lineup where RBIs can assist in judging productivity of players who are there to plate the placesetters (in other words, it’s better for an NL 8-hole hitter to attempt to put the ball in play with 0-1 outs and RISP than to try and draw a walk and leave the RBI opportunity up to a pitcher). it’s not a sole determiner by any stretch — a complementary stat at best, but hardly worth simply ignoring.
RBI is not a rate-stat, so it doesn’t tell us as much about productivity as it does about opportunity. if it at least told us the percentage of run-scoring opportunities converted by a player, it would tell us something useful about productivity
even as it is, RBI would still have some use if there were no other stats that more effectively measured what it purports to. but there are. so it doesn’t
your original suggestion that the significance of runs (a team stat on the scoreboard) speaks in any way to the usefulness of RBI (a separate, individual stat) was very silly
I’m in no way suggesting that RBI is the sole judge of a player’s productivity, but productivity in situations of opportunity separate the great players from the good. A hitter who is “always in scoring position” is the best hitter.
Statheads tried to quantify this with that useless ‘clutch’ rating, but there are some things in this game that simply cannot be quantified, no matter how hard some try.
As far as your last paragraph, yeah. notsureifsrs.
“productivity in situations of opportunity separate the great players from the good.”
again: RBI is not a rate-stat, so it doesn’t tell us as much about productivity
as it does about opportunity (opportunities to be produce runs). if it at least told us the percentage of
run-scoring opportunities converted by a player, it would tell us
something useful about productivity
“productivity in situations of opportunity separate the great players from the good”
Which RBIs does not measure, which is what notsureifsrs is saying.
A hypothetical player has 80 RBIs. Is he a good hitter or a bad hitter?
If you’re reaching for your reply button to ask what his other stats are, you see the problem with RBIs. 80 RBIs in 80 chances is fan-damn-tastic. 80 RBIs in 400 opportunities is bad. There are simply better stats to measure what people are trying to get at when they talk about RBIs in terms of individual performance, whether you accept them or dismiss them as the ranting of “statheads.”
As an aside, I find it hilarious that people would actually try to invent a pejorative term for people who are simply trying to make sure what we think is happening is actually happening. I don’t buy 100% into all the advanced stats, but I appreciate what they’re trying to do and I recognize that RBIs are simply a silly stat to use to try to talk about a hitter’s performance.
How could me asking what his other stats are have anything to do with my primary point, which is that RBIs are a worthwhile supplementary stat? You can’t just throw out the primary point of my argument in order to find something you disagree with.
…really?
Because RBI tells you nothing without looking at other stats. How is that worthwhile? You can be a great hitter or a bad one with a good RBI total, and you have no idea which it is until you look at the other stats. So why not just look at the other stats to begin with?
Also, your hypothetical argument that 80 RBI in 400 chances is a strawman. How many players get that opportunity?
How many players drive in 80 runs in 80 opportunities? It wasn’t intended to be a statement of fact, it was a hypothetical examining both extremes of a number and the fact that the number itself is meaningless. If you want to accuse me of logical errors, then ignoring parts you don’t like and accepting ones that are equally invalid but support your theory is simply disingenuous. If you can’t see that these numbers are not meant to be literal, well, that’s your problem, not mine. It’s glaringly obvious to anybody trying to understand the point being made rather than simply shouting “STRAWMAN STRAWMAN!” as if they have proved something by it.
The number of runs you drive in is irrelevant. If you’re insistant on looking at runs driven in as some sort of player evaluation metric, you would need to look at the RATE of runs driven in. Which means you need two additional statistics: The players’ RBI rate and the league- or position-average RBI rate, depending on what you’re gunning for. Even then its value is questionable, and hinges largely on how you choose to define an “opportunity.”
Look at it this way. My buddy the hypothetical hitter is at bat. There is a runner on first base, and the hitter smacks a double down the right field line. If that runner is Jacoby Ellsbury or some other fast runner, you probably have an RBI. If it is Bengie Molina, you probably don’t. (And if we want to get even more complicated we could evaluate the arm and accuracy of the right fielder at the given moment too.) The hitter does the EXACT same thing in either case. In one case he has an RBI and in one he does not. Depending on who the hitter is, who his teammates are and where he’s batting in the lineup, he may get a disproportionate number of the Ellsbury situations or the Molina situations and thus have different RBI totals — and this is only one of several different ways that identical performance on the players’ part can lead to different results, the most obvious being somebody batting behind high OBP players and somebody else who doesn’t. So how is looking at the RBIs of the two divergent hypothetical batters valuable?
Like I said before, you know nothing about what the number of RBIs mean, even including if it is good or bad, until you look at other information — that’s pretty much the definition of a useless stat. I prefer my stats to actually, you know, say something that doesn’t require a reference to see what it means and doesn’t instantly inflate by being on a better team. If you don’t, well, so be it. I guess I’m just a “stathead.”
I tell you that a STL player leads in BA, OBP, SLG, wOBA, and HR’s and it’s NOT Pujols.
It MUST be Matt Holliday!
How suprise is everybody that Pujol isn’t top 5 in ALL these categories? He’s sill going to get paid no matter what. So no worries for him and his family and kids and kids kids haha.
Definitely surprising. Perhaps hes’ the type of guy that doesn’t play well when it’s playing for a contract?
Regardless, I can’t imagine this will put much of a dent in his payday this coming summer, and if I were a team considering signing Albert Pujols, I wouldn’t be deterred one iota at signing him. I’d be absolutely shocked if he doesn’t bounce back not only later this season, but definitely into the next several years before he may begin what will ACTUALLY be his decline phase (which for the first few seasons of it, may still be better than 90% of the first basemen out there).