I stumbled on this while looking over some baseball player comparisons.

I know that RBIs is near the top of the list of baseball stats that are now looked down upon, (though while this is justified in part as a means of assessing individual player contributions, it also goes along with the current dominant paradigm of not seeing a baseball team and wins as units of analysis, and so is influenced by the methodological individualism that pervades and distorts almost all of our ways of seeing the world in recent decades - but I digress). 

But this is still striking, even allowing for how many pennant winning teams Joe Dimaggio played on.

OF course, you need people on base in front of you to drive in runs, but many of the hitters on this list arguably had players batting in front of them that had better OBPs than the people Dimaggio hit behind. This probably explains much of why Gehrig is at the top of the list as far as I could find. He hit behind Babe Ruth. But Al Simmons' numbers partly reflect Max Bishop's amazing lifetime OBP. I don't really know who was typically hitting in front of Dimaggio. But given his lower HR totals his RBI per 162 is just astounding ! Further, the RBI numbers of many of the deadball era hitters are equally striking. 

Has baseball been getting it all wrong after all? I wouldn't say that necessarily, nor call for a turn away from the statistical revolution of recent years. 


But after growing up a Yankees' fan in the 1960s and 70s whereby Dimaggio was royalty, then finding out a) he was a pretty rotten person really, and b) coming to the conclusion that there is good reason to think he was overrated compared with Ted Williams, Stan Musial (who however said that Dimaggio was always a greater player than he), Mickey Mantle and others, I must say that I have some newfound respect for the Yankee Clipper. After all, you do have to hit pretty consistently with people on base to have 143 RBI per 162 games, and he did it without Gehrig or Greenberg or Ruth's HR numbers. 

Another thing: why are Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays' (and some others) RBI per 162 so low? This seems almost equally anomalous. 

Anyway, someone out there may find a few players I missed who belong on this list and did better, but this was what I have been able to discover:

Joe Dimaggio 13 years   PA: 7673  AB: 6821  HR: 361  RBI: 1537  RBI per 162: 143

Mickey Mantle: 18 years:  PA: 9907  AB: 8102  HR: 536 RBI: 1509   RBI per 162: 102

 

Ted Williams: 19 years: PA: 9788 AB:7706 HR: 521 RBI: 1839     RBI per 162 games:  130

 

Henry Aaron:  23 years:  PA: 13941  AB: 12364 HR: 755 RBI:2297  RBI per 162 games: 113

 

Willie Mays: 22 years:  PA: 12496  AB: 10881 HR: 660 RBI:1903  RBI per 162 games: 103

 

Babe Ruth: 22 years: PA: 10622  AB: 8399  HR: 714  RBI: 2214  RBI per 162 games:  143

 

Lou Gehrig: 17 years: PA: 9663  AB: 8001  HR: 493  RBI: 1995  RBI per 162 games: 149

 

Barry Bonds: 22 years:  PA: 12606  AB: 9847  HR: 762  RBI: 1996  RBI per 162 games: 108

 

Jimmy Foxx: 20 years:  PA: 9676  AB: 8134 HR: 534 RBI: 1922 RBI per 162 games: 134

 

Al Simmons: 20 years:  PA: 9518  AB: 8759  HR: 307  RBI: 1828  RBI per 162 games: 134

 

Mark McGwire: 16 years: PA: 7660 AB: 6187  HR: 583  RBI: 1414  RBI per 162 games: 122

 

Sammy Sosa: 18 years: PA: 9896  AB: 8813  HR: 609 RBI: 1667 RBI per 162: 115

 

Albert Pujols: 14 years: PA: 9241 AB: 7943 HR: 520 RBI: 1603 RBI per 162: 123

 

Alex Rodriguez: 20 years: PA: 11344 AB: 9818 HR: 654 RBI: 1969 RBI per 162: 124

 

Mike Schmidt: 18 years: PA: 10062 AB: 8352 HR: 548 RBI: 1595  RBI per 162: 107

 

Stan Musial: 22 years: PA: 12717 AB: 10972  HR: 475  RBI: 1951  RBI per 162: 104

 

Eddie Mathews: 17 years: PA: 10100  AB: 8537  HR: 512  RBI: 1453  RBI per 162: 98

 

Hack Wilson: 12 years:  PA: 5556  AB: 4760 HR: 244  RBI: 1063  RBI per 162: 128

 

Ken Griffey, Jr.: 22 years:  PA: 11304  AB: 9801  HR: 630 RBI: 1836 RBI per 162: 111

 

Juan Gonzalez: 17 years:   PA. 7155 AB: 6556  HR: 434  RBI: 1404  RBI per 162 games: 135

 

Frank Thomas: 19 years: PA: 10075  AB: 8199  HR: 521  RBI: 1704  RBI per 162 games: 119

 

Miguel Cabrera: 12 years: PA: 7811 AB: 6829 HR: 390 RBI: 1369  RBI per 162 games: 122

 

Ernie Banks: 19 years: PA: 10394  AB: 9421  HR: 512  RBI: 1636  RBI per 162 games: 105

 

Harmon Killebrew: 22 years: PA: 9833  AB: 8147  HR: 573  RBI: 1584 RBI per 162 games: 104

 

Frank Robinson: 21 years:  PA: 11742  AB: 10006  HR: 586  RBI: 1812  RBI per 162 games: 105

 

Ty Cobb: 24 years: PA: 13084  AB: 11434  HR: 117 RBI: 1938  RBI per 162 games: 103

 

Rogers Hornsby: 23 years: PA: 9480  AB: 8173  HR: 301 RBI: 1584  RBI per 162 games: 114

 

Honus Wagner: 21 years:  PA: 11748  AB: 10439 HR. 101  RBI: 1733 RBI per 162 games: 100

 

Nap LaJoe: 21 years: PA: 10461  AB: 9589  HR: 82 RBI: 1599 RBI per 162 games: 104

 

Reggie Jackson: 21 years: PA: 11418 AB: 9864  HR: 563  RBI: 1702 RBI per 162 games: 98

 

George Brett 21 years: PA: 11625  AB: 10349  HR: 317  RBI: 1596  RBI per 162 games: 96

 

Hank Greenberg: 13 years:  PA: 6097  AB: 5193  HR: 331 RBI: 1276   RBI per 162 games: 148

 

Rafael Palmeiro: 20 years: PA: 12046  AB: 10472  HR: 569 RBI: 1835  RBI per 162 games: 105

Manny Ramirez: 19 years: PA: 9774 AB: 8244 HR: 555 RBI: 1831  RBI per 162: 129

 

David Ortiz: 18 years: PA: 8851  AB: 7575  HR: 466 RBI: 1533 RBI per 162: 118

 

Vladimir Guerrero: 16 years: PA: 9059 AB: 8155 HR: 449 RBI: 1496 RBI per 162: 113

Goose Goslin: 18 years: PA: 9829 AB: 8656  HR: 248 RBI. 1610 RBI per 162 games: 114

 

Willie McCovey: 22 years: PA: 9692  AB: 8197  HR: 521 RBI: 1555 RBI per 162 games: 97

 

Jim Thome: 22 years: PA: 10313 AB: 8422 HR: 612 RBI: 1699 RBI per 162 games: 108

 

Cap Anson: 27 years: PA: 11331 AB: 10281  HR: 97 RBI: 2075 RBI per 162 games: 133

 

 

RBI per 162 games:

 Top 15:

 

Lou Gehrig:  149

 

Hank Greenberg:  148

 

Joe Dimaggio: 143

 

Babe Ruth: 143

 

Juan Gonzalez: 135

 

Jimmy Foxx: 134

 

Al Simmons: 134

 

Cap Anson: 133

 

Ted Wililams: 130

 

Manny Ramirez: 129

 

Hack Wilson: 128

 

Alex Rodriguez: 124

 

Albert Pujols: 123

 

Mark McGwire: 122

 

Frank Thomas: 119

 

 

 

bump. I get it: no one here cares about RBI, but I still would like to know how Dimaggio's number are so high while Mantle's and Mays' are so low and why the numbers are often very high for even deadball era hitters. Can we get some ideas here?

can you please translate that first paragraph i think you may have hit the latin button by mistake :) i agree about mantle i have him in a prog and i am amazed every season when i set my keepers how low his RBI"s were.  In fact from 52 to 63 he scored more runs than drove them in. He only had 4 100 RBI season in his career  seems strange for a guy with 521 HR's

It is weird, isn't it?  That whole Yankees era seems somewhat over-rated in retrospect, though Bill James has made a good argument that Mantle is generally under-rated (his OBP are very high, accounting for his runs scored). 

I am willing to believe that RBI are a residual category, and a dependent variable - sorry, more Latin: in other words they are an effect and not generally a cause - with respect to other statistics. 

BUT, having said that, with respect to TEAM outcomes - wins and losses they may yet be an independent variable - a cause of victory, at least, and this is one of the points of this thread, in exceptional cases. 

Is it possible that the enormous success of the Yankees during Joe Dimaggio's tenure with the team are in some part due to the fact that he drove in runs at a statistically outlying level, that is beyond what should have been statistically probable?

Stats have for a while shown that there is no such thing as a clutch hitter. Is Dimaggio an exception to that rule?

And finally, HOW heck did those deadball hitters drive in so many runs in such low-scoring eras? 

It gets stranger in Dimaggio's case: he had two big RBI seasons: 1937 (167) and 1948  (155). 

In 1937 he WAS on a team with Lou Gehrig, Bill Dickey and Tommy Henrich (who had very good OBP career-long). So we could say - Ah Ha ! italyprof, it is just the usual: RBI is a dependent variable, the result of Dimaggio batting behind amazing hitters with great OBP. They were on base. He drove him in.

I checked box scores on baseball-reference at random in 1937 - Dimaggio batted third that season, behind Frankie Crosetti (OBP: 340) and Red Rolfe (OBP: .365), so behind two GOOD OBP players, but hardly earth-shaking getters on base. He batted AHEAD of Gehrig, Dickey and Henrich. 

In 1948, we do have a more typical situation: Bobby Brown batted first and had a .383 OBP that year, but in only 114 games, and Henrich hit second with a .391 OBP playing nearly every day. Dimaggio again hit third. So that is more explainable, though Dimaggio's .320 with 39 homers, while a great season, is hardly among history's best. 

Stan Musial was the best player in baseball that year, and hit .376 with 39 homers, and drove in 131 runs, 24 fewer than Dimaggio, though a career-high for Musial. But Musial seems to have batted generally after Red Schoendienst and Marty Marion whose OBPs for 1948 are absurdly low (as opposed to very high numbers for Enos Slaughter - who hit fourth, and Ron Northey who hit 6th. The Cards came in second that year, 6 games behind the Braves, and it might be because their manager did not know how to fill out a lineup card. 

I should also answer your question about the first paragraph riji4191: 

One of the limitations I see in the otherwise very useful more sophisticated use of statistics in recent years (or by now decades) is that nearly all of them are focused on individual player performances, as if those could in no way be not just a cause of the team outcomes but in part a result. 

In fact any individual player statistic that IS clearly a partial result of the player's being on a certain team is treated as useless and irrelevant, so wins and losses and ERA for pitchers are out of fashion, and RBIs are as well. 

BUT, the correct methodology - the correct way to look at stats and which stats to use are not always the same. They are determined by what the question is. IF the question is: can we determine as nearly as possible the individual player performance, accounting for and taking out of the equation any impact of the team, park, etc. then these stats are good ones. 

IF we want to know why a certain team performs the way it does as a team, in other words why teams win games and pennants - which the last time I looked was the WHOLE POINT OF BASEBALL, then I think these are useful up to a point, but miss whole aspects of the game. 

Why would we have moved from team and player-contribution-to-and-as-part-of-a-team based stats to individual ones? Many reasons:

first, players want money as much or more than pennants in a free agent era. So they are not negotiating as much on the basis of "look how much I contributed to the Cubs" but rather "see how much better my individual stats are than Joe's over there who are also thinking of signing instead".

Second, teams are also treating players as individual investments, rather than as team players at least up to the signing but even afterward they need to now determine NOT the value of a player, say Robinson Cano, to their team, but Cano's value on the market as an individual commodity available for exchange.

Third, the impact of Fantasy Baseball, or Rotisserie Baseball or whatever the heck it is called, where your results as a manager and even your results in betting money are the result of individual player stats, not how a team does. Note the difference with say, football pools where you want to know a likely point spread - you MUST calculate in likely player performances, but not just these, to do well at the latter. 

Fourth, here at WIS we of course mainly draft players for our teams, be they OL or progs, but also there is not WIS algorithm for how players will play together as a team, it is all the result of individual outcomes, meaning that here too we naturally and quite correctly focus on that. 

But the Fantasy baseball and WIS baseball worlds are not real life. Think of Warren Spahn: hitting is timing he said and pitching is messing with timing. Okay, we can quantify the results he has as a pitcher doing that using his lifetime or yearly stats - so it is not that this also cannot be quantified. BUT what about the impact of Spahn teaching this to other pitchers? How much is it worth it to a team to have Warren Spahn or Don Mattingly to use a concrete case, in the early to mid-90s, working with Paul O'Neill and Bernie Williams and others who then, according to numerous sources, passed on a lot of what Mattingly taught about hitting, patience, getting on base and just a philosophy of how to play, like running out ground balls in every case (something the 1998-9 Yankees were famous for)? His batting performances  over those years make him a good but hardly great player as he had been from 1983-7 or so. But if a 125-50 record in 1998 is the long-term result of having had him in the clubhouse in 1993-4 then it matters. 

Some of this can't easily be quantified, of course. But sometimes we should at least look at player performances in context of teams (not just ballparks which is the only social context allowed): see Kevin Brown, or Jeff Weaver, or Kenny Rogers and how they performed with the Yankees compared to how they did immediately before or afterward with other teams. 

The currently in fashion ways of looking at player stats look at the player stats as givens. They then try to explain them. Traditional stats saw the player's part on a team and tried in part to see how well they did individually and how they contributed to a team's outcome, so saw them as both cause and effect and tried to explain the outcomes  of individual player stats by other causal factors (some of which like pitching speed or bat speed CAN be quantified of course) not all of which are easily determined by looking at that player alone. 

This is why I still prefer Bill James' Win Shares to the much more fashionable WAR, or at least one of the main reasons: Win Shares looks at how a team did and tried to figure out the contribution a player made to that as part of a team. WAR is interested in how high a player's salary should be on the market and whether I should draft him for my Fantasy baseball team. 

Interesting posts, Professor.  I can't explain it, either.  I do recall, from watching Bonds during his monster years (2001-204), that he simply wasn't given the opportunities to drive in runs.  So in arguably the four best consecutive offensive seasons ever, he averaged just 112 RBI a year.  Perhaps Dimaggio, because he was never as "feared" (i.e. didn't hit as many HR as most of the batters on your list), saw better pitches with men on base?

Funny story about "pretty rotten person" Joe Dimaggio.  He was pretty dumb, too.  When he first heard the famous lyric in Mrs. Robinson ("Where have you gone, Joe Dimaggio..."), he was ******.  He told people, "I didn't go anywhere.  I'm right here!"  After a while he realized Paul Simon wasn't calling him a forgotten has-been -- he was immortalizing him.  And then Dimaggio started keeping a cassette of the song in his car that his driver would play for him.

also bonds was walked a lot out of hatred for him by the pitchers.

Two thoughts:
-None of the guys in your list are deadball hitters.
-Mantle often hit 3rd behind some really bad hitters,guys like Bobby Richardson, with an OBP around .300

Dimaggio's goal was to "seep the sacks"...he also played in far fewer seasons never really playing beyond his prime. He was also very productive from the outset of his career. It would be interesting to compare his batting average with men on base versus these other players...

Posted by italyprof on 2/22/2015 6:41:00 AM (view original):
bump. I get it: no one here cares about RBI, but I still would like to know how Dimaggio's number are so high while Mantle's and Mays' are so low and why the numbers are often very high for even deadball era hitters. Can we get some ideas here?

I think there is a simple explanation. Joe D only played 13 years. (Lost 3 seasons to WW2)  He didn't have the long decline period that almost every other player had. Take everyone's five-year or seven-year peak and compare those. Mantle had one healthy good year after age 30, (1964), but played until he was 36. He only had 4 seasons of 100+ RBI + all those BB. Musial did not have a 100 RBI season his last six years. DiMaggio's worst year was his last one and he retired.Tack on three more seasons of decline and see what his RBI/162 would be. Knock off the first five and last two seasons of Ruth.    Take off Gehrig's first two and last year (14 rbi/ 31 games) 
Mays did not have 100 RBI his last seven seasons. Also Aaron, Mantle, and Mays all played in the low run environment of the 1960s.

Joe doesn't have the anchor of old age and average seasons pulling down his rate stats.

Yeah but he still lead the league in coffee makers and references to him in popular song !

I don't know about that Prof... Talkin' Baseball by Terry Cashman

The whiz kids had won it,
Bobby Thompson had done it,
And Yogi read the comics all the while.
Rock n roll was being born,
Marijuana we would scorn,
So down on the corner
The national past-time went on trial.

Refrain:
We're talkin' baseball
Kluzuski Campanella
Talkin' baseball
The man and Bobby Fella
The Scooter, the Barber, and the Newc
They knew them all from Boston to Dubuque
Especially Willie, Mickey, and the Duke.

Well Casey was winning,
Hank Aaron was beginning,
One Robbie going out, one coming in.
Kiner and Midget Cadell,
The Thumper and Mel Parnell,
And Ike was the only one winning down in Washington.

Refrain.

Now my old friend
The Bachelor
Wee he swore he was the Oklahoma Kid.
And Cookie played hooky
To go and see the Duke,
And me I always loved Wil Willie .
Those were the days.

Well now it's the 80's,
And Brett is the greatest,
And Bobby Bonds could play for everyone.
Rose is at the Vet,
Rusty again is a Met,
And the great Alexander is pitching again in Washington.

I'm talkin' baseball,
Like Reggie, Quisenberry,
Talkin' baseball,
Carew and Gaylord Perry,
Seaver, Bobby Schmidt and Vida Blue,
If Cooperstown is calling, it's no fluke.
They'll be with Willie, Mickey, and the Duke.
Willie, Mickey, and the Duke. (Say hey, say hey, say hey)
It was Willie, Mickey and the Duke (Say hey, say hey, say hey)
I'm talkin' Willie, Mickey and the Duke (Say hey, say hey, say hey)

and  Van Lingle Mungo by Dave Frishberg

Heenie Majeski, Johnny Gee
Eddie Joost, Johnny Pesky, Thornton Lee
Danny Gardella
Van Lingle Mungo

Whitey Kurowski, Max Lanier
Eddie Waitkus and Johnny Vandermeer
Bob Estalella
Van Lingle Mungo

Augie Bergamo, Sigmund Jakucki
Big Johnny Mize and Barney McCosky
Hal Trosky

Augie Galan and Pinky May
Stan Hack and Frenchy Bordagaray
Phil Cavaretta, George McQuinn
Howie Pollett and Early Wynn
Art Passarella
Van Lingle Mungo

John Antonelli, Ferris Fain
Frankie Crosetti, Johnny Sain
Harry Brecheen and Lou Boudreau
Frankie Gustine and Claude Passeau
Eddie Basinski
Ernie Lombardi
Hughie Mulcahy
Van Lingle...Van Lingle Mungo

Amazing song ! I will look for a YouTube version now. Thanks !

Here it is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWKA9Zi5-_Y

and apparently there is a version for each team, or most of them: 

here is a list: 

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=talkin%27+baseball+-+terry+cashman