Was Joe Carter a good RBI guy?

The announcers said he was on a game I watched a couple of weeks ago. 

 

I will look at the years 1986-1997 because that encompasses the years when Carter had his 10 seasons with 100+ RBIs. All data is from Stathead.

 

From 1986-1997, Joe Carter had the most years in the AL with 300+ PAs with runners on base (ROB). Here are the leaders in the AL over those years

 

Joe Carter   10
Cal Ripken Jr.   9
Rubén Sierra   8
Rafael Palmeiro   7
Frank Thomas   6
Kirby Puckett   6
Albert Belle   5
Cecil Fielder   5
Chili Davis   5
Don Mattingly   5
George Bell   5
Ken Griffey Jr.   5
Robin Ventura   5

 

During this stretch Carter had one year in the NL (1990). He had over 300 PAs with ROB that year as well. One of these years was 1994, a strike year when teams only played about 115 games. He had 251.

 

Here are his ranks in the AL in ROB PAs each year from 1986-1997:

 

6-11-15-1-3-5-2-8-12-10-15 

 

So he had 4 years in the top 5 and 3 others in the top 10. The year he ranked 8th was 1994 when no AL batter had 300 ROB PAs (Carter had 251). This means he was getting plenty of opportunities to drive in runs. 

 

Carter does not have impressive numbers with ROB. For all AL players with 2000+  PAs with ROB from 1986-97, he was 20th out of 44 players with a .470 SLG. Frank Thomas was the highest at .600.

 

For batting average under the same condition he was 39th in AVG with .263. 16 players were .300+ led by Molitor at .337. 

 

With bases empty or BE, Carter batted .261 in the AL during the years 1986-1997. His SLG was .484. So although he went up in AVG (just .002 from .261 to .263) moving from BE to ROB, his SLG actually went down. A team would want a guy in the middle of the order to slug higher with ROB than BE.

 

From 1986-1997, with BE, the entire AL had an AVG of .259 & SLG of .404. With ROB, those numbers were .272 & .415. So, for the typical player, AVG went up .013 with ROB (it was only .002 for Carter) and SLG went up .011 (it actually went down .014 for Carter).

 

If a player was a "good RBI man" we would expect big increases in both his AVG & SLG with ROB. But we do not see that with Carter.

 

If we include his NL season (1990), from 1986-1997 his AVG & SLG with BE were .256 & .472. With ROB, they were .262 & .468. Again, he goes down with in SLG with ROB while only going up .006 in AVG.

 

For both leagues combined, from 1986-1997, AVG & SLG with BE were .256 & .394. With ROB they were  .269 & .407. So for the average player, we see a gain of .013 in AVG moving from BE to ROB (Carter only goes up .006) and a gain of .013 in SLG (Carter actually went down .004). So there is no evidence of Carter hitting especially well with ROB.

 

What if we do the stats with runners in scoring position (RISP)?  Here Carter, over the years 1986-1997 (including his one year in the NL), had a .272  AVG and a .473 SLG. Compared to BE, his AVG goes up .016 and his SLG goes up .001.

 

For both leagues combined, from 1986-1997, AVG & SLG with RISP, AVG was .263 and SLG was .399. So AVG goes up .007 (for Carter it was .016) while SLG goes up .005 (Carter only went up .001).

 

What does Carter's extra AVG gain of .009 (.016 vs. .007) tell us? He had 2090 ABs with RISP from 1986-1997. Multiply that by .009 and we get 18.81 more hits compared to what an average hitter would gain with RISP. That works out to 1.57 extra hits per year for Carter.

 

Even if we suppose some extreme conditions, that those hits were all singles instead of some other hit and all happened with runners on both 2nd and 3rd and all those runners scored on these singles, we would just get 3.14 extra RBIs per year. Not much. And we have to remember, Carter's SLG actually went down with ROB, so there we would have to reduce his RBIs compared to what the average player might have gotten.

 

So again, the evidence shows no special ability to get RBIs. And the evidence also shows that he batted with ROB quite often. 

 

As another example of how important opportunities are, in 1930 Hack Wilson had 425 PAs with ROB, 3rd highest ever. He set the RBI record that year with 191. The highest number of PAs with ROB is 427, belonging to Hank Greenberg (1937, 184 RBIs) and Dixie Walker (1945, 124 RBIs with just 8 HRs-he batted a good but not great .301 with runners on base so opportunities helped him quite a bit).

 

Wilson also had the 9th most PAs with RISP ever, 262. That is just 12 less than the highest belonging to Frank Baker in 1912 (who had a 130 RBIs on just 10 HRs).

 

The last word goes to the great Branch Rickey. He indicated that opportunities were important in his famous 1954 LIFE Magazine article. Here is what he said about RBIs:

"As a statistic, RBIs were not only misleading but dishonest. They depended on managerial control, a hitter's position in the batting order, park dimensions and the success of his teammates in getting on base ahead of him." 

I posted the article recently here at my blog. See GOODBY TO SOME OLD BASEBALL IDEAS.