Frazier and RBI

RBI is an individual statistic highly influenced by the surrounding team. A player might hit poorly, but on a team with a high OBP, he might wind up driving in lots of runs anyway. A player may hit well, but be starved of base runners to drive in. Sometimes, like Juan Gonzalez in 1998, a player hits well and his team provides him with tons of runners, and an historic season results. Then there is Todd Frazier.

I use RBI Percentage, (RBI-HR)/Men on Base, to measure the ability of a hitter to drive in runners other than himself. In looking at players with very high men on base totals since the start of 2014, I noticed Frazier owned the lowest RBI percentage in the majors, 12.75%. There have been just 34 players who came to the plate with at least 1000 runners on base in that time period. The median percentage for the group is 16.25%, and the high is David Ortiz at 18.46%. I find Frazier last interesting because he hit a high number of home runs in that time period, 94, and home runs are great at scoring runners from first base. If you want to make a case for a player being not clutch, Frazier is the man.

So why does a good home run hitter, whose teams supplied him with plenty of runners, drive in so few of them? If you look at his situational hitting in that time, his slash line with men in scoring position is .200/.298/.383 versus an overall line of .252/.317/.478. That’s a huge drop in batting average; the probability of a .252 hitter getting no more than 81 hits in 405 at bats is .008. However, the probability of his OBP being that low is .20, or 1 in 5, which fits fine in the idea that this is just random fluctuation, with Frazier trading hits for walks.

His BABIP, however, is also way down.* His over BABIP in this time frame is .274, and with runners in scoring position it drops to .229. So a plausible scenario is that pitchers work carefully to Frazier with runners in scoring position to prevent long hits. Frazier is selective enough to increase his walk rate, but not selective enough to forgo swinging at bad pitches to attempt to drive in runs. That leads to worse contact and more outs on batted balls. In general, Frazier is not that selective a hitter compared to league average. So pitchers are able to exploit his weakness when Frazier might do the most damage. That’s as good a definition of not clutch as I’ve seen.

*Note that in this case I tend to use a different version of BABIP than you see on other sites. I don’t use sacrifice flies, since I’m studying batting average, and those are removed from BA.

from baseballmusings.com http://ift.tt/2b9bgoT