Looking at RBIs from a different angle and adding some context can show who the truly elite run producers are.
Not that long ago, Runs Batted In, or RBIs for short, were considered one of the premiere offensive stats. A guy with over 100 RBIs was a guy you absolutely wanted in your lineup. RBIs are still part of the “triple crown” of offensive players where if a player leads the league in batting average, home runs, and RBIs simultaneously he is considered to be the best of the best.
But in recent decades, RBIs have fallen out of favor among statheads everywhere. As more and more advanced statistics have become more mainstream the data has allowed people to realize that, at least on a surface level, RBIs are as much a factor of opportunity as they are talent at driving runs in. Which is to say, the most likely reason for a player to have a lot of RBIs is because other players are creating RBI opportunities for him, not due to any innate ability to drive runs in. If, for some reason, you built your lineup with Shohei Ohtani leading off, Bobby Witt Jr. batting second, and MJ Melendez batting third, MJ might still get over 100 RBIs. Not because he’s a good hitter, but because he just has so many RBI opportunities.
In 2024, the Royals somewhat famously had three of the best raw RBI guys in the sport. They were the first to have three guys at 70, 80, and 90 RBIs. They likely would have been the first (and only) team with three guys at 100, too, if Vinnie Pasquantino hadn’t missed the final month of the season. Everyone knows all about Bobby Witt Jr.’s elite hitting this year. Salvador Perez is often spoken of as if he were better than he is, but he’s been nearly as good as the hype this season. Still, everyone wondered, why did the Royals’ offense completely crater when Vinnie got hurt despite the fact that by most metrics, he was merely a league-average bat?
Vinnie finished the season with 97 RBIs, still good enough for 19th in MLB despite the missing month. But his OPS was third-worst among the top 25 RBI leaders and fourteenth-worst in the top 50. He finished the season with a 108 wRC+, just barely above league average. That’s enough to cause some people to complain about his performance. Certainly, playing at first base, you would generally like to see more offense from a guy. But one thing wRC+ doesn’t take into account is a player’s RBIs; those are, after all, assumed to be extremely reliant on the other players.
I am clearly not front office material or I wouldn’t be writing for pennies and pop tarts at a team sports blog. But I still wondered, what if we could view RBIs through a lens that controlled for the types of plate appearances runners had? That’s when the crew in the Royals Review writer slack came through clutch for me and clued me into the Bases Occupied splits at Baseball Reference.
I usually prefer FanGraphs for their more readable interface and the ability to filter results using broad-spectrum but user-friendly forms. That said, when you want splits, Baseball Reference is the place to go because they’ve got almost every split you could ever imagine. And they came through here. They even, crucially, have a Bases Occupied splits table for the entire league. That allows one to develop an average number of RBIs per plate appearance in every configuration of runners on base and outs possible. If you’ve got a league average, you can tell who is above and below average, and by how much.
And so now, for the first time, I’d like to introduce you to two new stats I’d like to bring to the dialog: Runs Batted In Over Expected (RBIOE) and RBI+. The first will give you the raw number of RBIs a batter earned more (or less) than the league average given the runner and out situations he came to plate in. The latter calculates at what percentage that batter drives in runs compared to the league average – that will allow you to compare hitters with different numbers of plate appearances.
And so, without further ado, let’s take a look at the top 25 RBI hitters in MLB and compare them on these stats.
First, some caveats
There are some rather obvious takeaways we can start with. When you’re looking at the top 25 RBI totallers in the league, you’d expect them to all be above average at driving runs in. We see here that that is the case, as they all have positive RBIOEs and therefore RBI+s over 100.
We also, as you might expect, see a lot of guys with very high wRC+ numbers. Whether managers are using that exact number or something else to help them build their lineups, guys who hit are going to end up in RBI spots and if they’re in RBI spots, we’d expect them to drive in runners. Among the top 25 here only one batter comes in below average, Spencer Steer.
“RBI+ – wRC+” might be a difficult to read (or say) stat, and it’s also incredibly unscientific, but OPS is also incredibly unscientific and it turns out to be incredibly useful in understanding how good a hitter is. There’s far too little data here to know whether the same will prove true of “RBI+ – wRC+” and it also needs a less unwieldy name, but I included it for curiosity’s sake nonetheless. If it is worth anything, I would use it to determine which guys drove in lots of runs simply because they’re great hitters and which ones did it because they had something of a nose for getting runners home.
Finally, this is just one year’s worth of data for 25 players. You absolutely should not assume it’s predictive of anything without further study. Unfortunately, given my access to the data, it is very time- and labor-heavy work to get even these 25 players, so don’t expect to see me diving into this any further any time soon. Figuring that sort of stuff out about this stat is a task for someone who makes this sort of thing their full-time job, not a lightly-paid hobby.
So what can we take away from this?
First of all, while you wouldn’t want to say a player with five more RBIs than another is clearly better, I think this data shows it’s reasonable to think that if a batter is one of the best in the sport at driving in runs, there’s more to it than simply that they had more opportunities to do so.
Juan Soto and Bobby Witt Jr. both batted second in their respective lineups, but the Yankees’ leadoff hitter was on-base considerably more often, so you might be tempted to think Soto had more opportunities. However, the numbers say otherwise as Witt actually had five more xRBI. RBI+ doesn’t even take into account how much more often Soto walked than Bobby while striking out a similar amount. That surely reduced the number of RBIs he could attempt to obtain.
And, of course, many other number two hitters around the sport who also all had better leadoff men in front of them didn’t drive in as many runs as Bobby. Elly De La Cruz, a pretty good batter in his own right, had 70 xRBI and 76 true RBI.
Secondly, I think the wide variance in wRC+ and RBI+ shows us that some batters may not be elite at hitting constantly, but they make sure to get those RBIs when they have chances. And they may see chances where other players don’t. Vinnie Pasquantino and Spencer Steer were not world-beaters by wRC+ by any means, but they made sure to get runners home far more often than you might have expected
At the other end of the spectrum, some hitters may find fewer RBI opportunities than other players and just focus on their own game regardless of who is on which base or how many outs there are. This isn’t a criticism of them, it doesn’t seem correct to suggest those players should change how they do things. And certainly someone like Aaron Judge, who had the worst difference between his wRC+ and his RBI+, did just fine by his team in 2024 and even with the difference between the two numbers handily led baseball in both stats.
Finally, let’s circle back to Pasquantino for a moment. Vinnie ends up the eleventh-best by RBI+ despite being the second-worst by wRC+ on this list. Even if these stats aren’t predictive, it at least explains why the Royals’ lineup absolutely tanked when it lost him for a month. He might not have been the best hitter in 2024, or the best hitter on the Royals, or even a particularly above-average hitter in general. But the dude knew how to drive in runs, and on a roster full of guys who weren’t good at that (other than his neighbors in the lineup) it was incredibly important. I’m not saying the Royals should pay him Juan Soto money, but it would be a mistake to assume that just because his wRC+ wasn’t as high as you’d like that he wasn’t a real contributor to the Royals’ offense in 2024.
All this is perhaps a lot of effort, time and digital ink to share a simple thought. RBIs aren’t a totally useless stat. They’ve just got to be contextualized a bit in order to draw out the meaning. And, at the very least, the Royals offense will almost certainly be improved in 2025 with the addition of Jonathan India in front of three elite RBI guys.