The Greatness of Ryan Howard

This is sort of random, but I was reading a baseball-related comment thread the other day wherein some people were debating whether or not the Phillies would be any good this upcoming season. Basically, one person said that, look, they haven't been much good of late, but they do have six players with great resumes: Roy Halladay, Cliff Lee, Cole Hamels, Chase Utley, Jimmy Rollins, and Ryan Howard. The other person responded with skepticism about the idea that Howard can be considered "great." The substance behind that claim is that Howard is a poor defensive first baseman who can't run, so in order to be a great player he doesn't just need to be a great hitter, he needs to be a great hitter, and this he is not. Sure, he puts up gaudy home run totals, with 300 in the first 9 years of his career. And sure, his batting line of .271/.364/.551 looks nice. But since he plays in Philadelphia, a very good hitter's park, it's not as impressive as you might think. And as for his most notable stat, his gaudy RBI numbers (149 in 2006, 136 in 2007, 146 in 2008, 141 in 2009, a total of 920 over 1098 games), well, the RBI stat is pretty much a joke in these circles these days. After all, RBI is mostly a function of how many people happen to have been on base for you. Scoring runs is a team effort, but we dish out individual statistical credit for it in somewhat arbitrary ways.

This last point has always slightly bothered me. Is there really no value to the RBI as a measure of individual performance? I don't think so. As with pitchers' wins, it's a stat that has a lot of noise against fairly little signal, but that doesn't mean there's no signal or that you can't tease it out from the noise. Consider the difference between Ryan Howard and Adam Dunn. They're rather similar players; Dunn has a career line of .240/.370/.499, and has also played in a lot of pitcher's parks. Dunn is, perhaps, a slightly worse hitter than Howard (and much worse overall), averaging 38 home runs and 96 runs driven in per 162 games, to Howard's 44 HRs and 136 RBIs. But the difference in home runs, a little less than 16%, is a lot less than the nearly 42% gap in RBI rates. Is that just about their teams, or do the players themselves have something to do with it? Well, we can disaggregate team contribution from player contribution by looking at performance in different bases-occupied situations. This isn't perfect, since the speed of baserunners can vary in ways that affect the ease of driving in runs, but it does most of the work for us. So, how do Howard and Dunn stack up in those different situations?



Using the metric of RBIs per {plate appearances minus intentional walks}, the results are clear: Ryan Howard is a situationally better hitter than Adam Dunn. With the bases empty, they drive in runs at the same rate, at .06 per opportunity; that's just a measure of how often they hit solo home runs. But in every other situation, Howard is better: per opportunity with a runner on first, he gets .19 RBI to Dunn's .14; per bases-loaded opportunity, he gets .86 RBI to Dunn's .80; per opportunity with runners on first and second, he drives in .37 runs to Dunn's .30; with a runner at second, he averages .26 RBI to Dunn's .17; with a runner at third, .39 to Dunn's .29; with runners at the corners, .59 to Dunn's paltry .38, and with runners at second and third, .68 to Dunn's even-more-paltry .42.

I tried to peer into the peripherals to see if Howard is changing his approach in these RBI situations. In 2008, for instance, he hit .196/.281/.442 with the bases empty, striking out in almost a third of his plate appearances but launching a home run every 14.2 at-bats and racking up 2.26 bases per hit, while with runners in scoring position that same year he hit .320/.439/.589, striking out somewhat less and getting just 1.84 bases per hit. Over his whole career, however, it doesn't seem that there's any systemic difference. His walk rate varies from situation to situation, obviously; in fact, even if you exclude intentional walks, he still walks more in the obvious intentional-walk situations like runners at second and third. But there's fairly little variance in his strikeout rate, or his home run rate, or his home-runs-per-at-bat rate, or his bases per hit, between a bases-empty situation and an RBI situation. What variance there is seems to be noise. So perhaps the apparent elevation of Ryan Howard's performance when it has most mattered has been an illusion. Perhaps all that's going on is that over his 2275 plate appearances with the bases empty he's gotten very unlucky on balls in play, while in the 2426 plate appearance with men on base he's been very lucky.

Those are awfully big sample sizes, though, so I doubt it. It's awfully hard to look at Ryan Howard's career splits and not conclude that he is a different hitter when it matters the most. In 1758 "low-leverage," i.e. relatively unimportant, plate appearances, he's a .256/.348/.515 hitter, while in his 1027 "high-leverage" situations he's hit .292/.387/.598. That's a huge difference, consistently over his whole career, and it says to me that Ryan Howard is a legitimately clutch hitter. And that tells me that, while his obscene RBI totals are obviously in part the product of hitting behind Rollins and Utley, they're also in large part a product of his doing what it takes to drive runs in when he has the opportunity. A long time ago I thought that Ryan Howard was someone you didn't need to worry about coming up in a big situation, because he could be pitched to in a way that would result in a strikeout. A slightly less long time ago I realized that this was not the case, that he can only be reliably struck out when the bases are empty or near-empty, and that with men on base he's a bloody menace. And the stats bear me out on this. And it is this quality which, to my mind, means that "context-neutral" stats like most versions of Wins Above Replacement underestimate Howard as a hitter, and therefore as a player; it is this quality which means that Ryan Howard can genuinely be considered great.*

*When healthy.