RBIs & Wins Have Their Place In Baseball…

Just not as a great measure of how good a batter or pitcher is. Both are far too reliant on what other people on the team does. You put any great RBI hitter or winning pitcher on a bad baseball team & those numbers take a dive. So, under no circumstances should these two stats ever be put into any calculation that is supposed to suggest who is a better batter or pitcher.

RBIs & wins DO have their place in baseball & are useful, though. They aren’t “worthless” as some would like for you to believe & here’s why:

For RBIs, since 1990, well over 500 players in a single season who had atleast 100 RBIs were above average hitters according to OPS+ (on-base percentage + slugging percentage, it’s the percentage above the league average in that stat).. While only approximately 12 were below average. OPS is an accepted stat for measuring how good a hitter is.

As far as pitchers go, 15 wins is the number we’re looking for here.. Since 1990, yet again, approximately 370 starting pitchers who had atleast 15 wins were above average pitchers according to ERC+ (which is component ERA, the percentage above the league average, 100 is average).. Only 64 pitchers (again approximately) were below average.

So, what can we gather from this? Well, we can gather that anomalies happen, but, it is a general rule of thumb that if a hitter has 100 RBIs or more or a pitcher has 15 wins or more, that they must be pretty good.

Weird things are going to happen, but that doesn’t make these two stats “worthless”.. It just makes them flawed. I want someone to find me a stat that isn’t somehow flawed & that measures a player’s talent perfectly.. Once that happens, I will be the first to deem RBIs, wins & every other stat 100% worthless besides that one.