Miguel Cabrera and Maybe Deserving RBIs

Jeff Sullivan of Fangraphs just wrote a very interesting post about the way Miguel Cabrera changes his approach with runners on base, and in particular the way he changed the way he changes his approach with runners on base in 2013. The basic observations are that Cabrera in general swings more with runners on; that historically this increased aggressiveness has applied both to pitches in the strike zone and to pitches out of the zone; and that in 2013, this stopped being the case, that is, he was more aggressive in swinging at strikes with runners on, but not in swinging at balls. That is to say, in 2013 he managed to combine his more aggressive approach with runners on base with an increased feel for the strike zone and plate discipline. He also seemed to increase his swing rate on pitches on the interior part of the plate in particular, which he is legendary for punishing like a fiend out of hell.

Not said in the article is one of the things I think is most interesting about this observation. Because what we have here is an observation that in what you might call RBI opportunities, Cabrera actually does change his approach, and in some ways that might make him somewhat more likely to drive runners in. Moreover, in 2013, he changed that change in his approach for the better, and indeed absolutely crushed the ball with runners on. He also drove in 137 runs, and until he got injured late in the season he was contending to drive in a run per game. Now, the official position of the sabermetric community is that RBIs are an essentially worthless metric of individual value, that they vary based almost entirely on the strength of the hitters in front of you, i.e. not based on how good you are. Of course a better player will have more RBIs, but among two players who have similar overall batting lines a difference in RBI totals will be a reflection of team strength, not player quality. "Clutch" hitting is more or less a statistical illusion. That's the thinking.

But is this true in a case like Cabrera? Swing rates are among the least noisy data in baseball; the sample sizes are huge compared to things like at bats or whatever, and there are just a lot less confounding factors like defense or whatever. And we see very clearly that Cabrera has a very different approach with runners on base. He is also very successful with runners on base, and was particularly so with runners on base. Result, he had 137 RBIs in 652 plate appearances. Baseball-References says that an average MLB player would've had 67 RBIs over a similar span. Now, certainly, Cabrera had more runners on than an average player would've, but not that much more. He had a little under 25% more runners on third, and a smaller figure for runners on first and second. Being a bit overly generous, then, we might attribute a 25% increase over an average figure to his team. That would get him to 84 RBIs. He got to 84 RBIs in his 82nd game of the season, after his 378rd plate appearance. Yeah.

Now, y'know, the remaining 53 RBIs above average expectation are probably mostly just attributable to the fact that he hit .348/.442/.636 last year, which is a lot better than average. His wRC+ was 192. (Note that that doesn't actually mean he was nearly twice as good as an average player, since a slash line of .000/.000/.000 isn't a wRC+ of 0, it's -100 (just ask Justin Verlander); a 192 wRC+ means he generated 46% more value than an average player.) But he hit .366/.483/.733 with runners on base, for a wRC+ of 222, and .397/.529/.782 with runners in scoring position. wRC+: 243. His BAbip didn't even increase that much in those situations, going from .358 with the bases empty to .352 with runners on and .386 with runners in scoring position. Everything we can observe about his performance last year, very much including the data on his approach at the plate, suggests that Miguel Cabrera significantly elevated his game in RBI situations last year. He was great with the bases empty; he was Bonds with runners on. (Okay, Bonds in a down year, but within Barry Bonds range, which is plenty.)

And maybe that means he should get some credit for all those runs he drove in. It's really easy to say that, almost always, the RBI number doesn't really give us any useful information. That's one of the first things sabermetrics ever said, and it remains one of the most important. But the field has gotten to the point where it does and should say much more subtle things, and one of those things might be that, for this one unbelievably-good-at-hitting-pitched-baseballs player, the general rule might not hold. And maybe, therefore, we're okay with his MVP award.*


*Although I would've been more okay with it if he hadn't essentially missed the last month or so of the season, at least in terms of production. Before he got hurt he was at least keeping up with Trout by context-neutral stuff like WAR.

Good Job, BBWAA

Whaddaya know? All six of my picks to win the major end-of-year MLB awards won them. And these weren't predictive picks, mind you, these were on-the-merits picks. That would seem to imply that I think the Baseball Writers Association of America did a pretty good job in picking the winners. And I do, although I also think that it is a problem Mike Trout didn't win the AL MVP either of the last two years, given that he was unambiguously the best player in baseball in each of them. My personal feeling is that Cabrera deserved both of the awards, not because he was on a playoff team or had higher RBI totals or whatever, but because he (a) won the Triple Crown, and then (b) led Major League Baseball in batting average, on-base percentage, and slugging percentage all at once, and both of those feats are just kind of trump cards to me, or at least they put an extremely high burden on the case for any other contender. When someone is that offensively dominant, I'm gonna be inclined to give it to them, even though I would also be quite eager in another year to recognize the value of a gifted defensive shortstop or center fielder or catcher who can also hit pretty well. The situation the last two years in the A.L. has been a tough one, and I kind of hope that Trout does his thing again next year and Cabrera goes back to being just really good instead of ungodly, so that they can just give it to Trout already and the argument can stop. But overall I do think they got the awards pretty much right, which doesn't always happen, so good for them.

Miguel Cabrera is Good at Hitting

Last night, Miguel Cabrera of the Detroit Tigers hit three home runs. They were the three longest home runs of the night. After winning the Triple Crown last year, Cabrera leads the American League in runs batted in with 47 (after 42 games!) and in batting average at .387, and is only one behind the four-way tie for the league lead in home runs with 11. It is, at this point, tough to doubt that Miguel Cabrera is the best hitter in baseball. He turned it on in 2010. Well, okay, he's been pretty good for his entire career, and even better during his stay in Detroit, but since 2010, well...

Cabrera's batting average is .339, the best in baseball among those with at least 1000 at-bats. The next best is Joey Votto, at .324.

Cabrera's on-base percentage is .423, the second-best in baseball, behind only Votto's .438.

Cabrera's slugging percentage is .609, the best in baseball. Next best is Jose Bautista's .587.

That gives Cabrera an OPS of 1.033, noticeably ahead of Votto's .999 for the best in the game.

Cabrera has his 123 home runs over the past four seasons, trailing only Bautista's 133.

Cabrera has 145 doubles, just one behind Robinson Cano's 146 and second in baseball.

Cabrera has 649 hits, the best in baseball. Cano is second with 636.

Cabrera has driven in 417 runs, the best in baseball. Adrian Gonzalez is second at 355.

Cabrera has scored 365 runs, the most in the game, ahead of Ryan Braun's 341.

All this adds up to 195 Runs Above Average from Batting for Cabrera, according to Baseball-Reference. The next best over this period is Votto, with 165 RAAbat. I'm pretty sure that the categories I just listed are all the statistics that you want a great middle-of-the-order bat to excel at. For what it's worth, he has the sixth most walks in the game over these years with 284, behind Ben Zobrist (287), Carlos Pena (299), Jose Bautista (316), Joey Votto (332), and Prince Fielder (336). So, I suppose one could wish that he led the league in walks as well as hits. But it's awfully tough to complain when you're leading baseball in batting average by fifteen points. It's also probably not a coincidence that his walks dropped off from 108 in 2011 to just 66 last year, when he gained the threat of Prince Fielder behind him in the order; if Prince had signed elsewhere, he might've been closer to the lead there. But, seriously, first or second in average, on-base, slugging, home runs, doubles, hits, runs driven in, and runs scored. That's the best hitter in baseball. It's tough, at this point, to see Cabrera not making the Hall of Fame: this is only his age 30 season, it's only May, and he's got 332 career home runs, 1869 career hits (so he should hit 2000 later this year), 398 career doubles, 1170 career RBI, 995 career runs scored, and, oh yeah, 50 career Wins Above Replacement, despite being an absolutely incompetent defensive player. This guy is scary good. If anyone can do back-to-back Triple Crowns, it could well be Miggy.

How Not To Analyze Miguel Cabrera's MVP Win

As indeed I might have predicted in advance, I'm not entirely sure what to think about the American League Most Valuable Player race. I think I would have voted for Miguel Cabrera, who won, so I should be happy, but on the other hand, since I recognize that Mike Trout deserved the award at least as much as Cabrera, I'd've liked to see it a wee bit closer. But I do know some things that I definitely do not think about the race, and many of them are exemplified by this article on Slate, whose thesis is that, like Mitt Romney, Miguel Cabrera was the candidate of old white men, but unlike Romney, his electorate consisted mostly of that group, so he won while Romney lost.

Problems abound. First of all, Miguel Cabrera is himself Hispanic, while Mike Trout is rather distinctly white. Furthermore, as admitted in the article itself, all three of the not-white-men who got to vote for AL MVP voted for, uh, Cabrera. So it looks like race isn't the main factor here, although there is a more plausible statistical link with age. But my more fundamental problem is the way the article frames the arguments behind supporting Cabrera: as unthinking, reactionary gibberish combined with a healthy dose of you-kids-get-off-my-lawn-ism. The evidence for this point seems to be one guy who wrote a column that has exactly these traits, and from this single datum it is inferred that this is the only argument which can be made for Trout. My argument, on the other hand, is simple and, I think, reasonable: yes, Trout was clearly the better player this past season, but Miguel Cabrera won the frickin' Triple Crown, and that's just a trump card. I admit openly that this is what one might call an irrational argument, or at least a non-rational argument. But because I admit it, because I say openly that I think the award ought to go to player X despite the fact that player Y had a better season of baseball, I'm not being ignorant or reactionary or acting in knee-jerk opposition to modern statistical analysis.

This sentence in particular bothers me:

Miguel Cabrera’s voters are ink-stained traditionalists who long for a time before nerds ruined baseball by explaining how it worked.

Now, this might be descriptively true, although to be sure you'd need to look at the roughly two-dozen individuals who did vote for Cabrera and ask them why they voted the way they did. But it doesn't have to be true. It's perfectly possible, for example, to be perfectly aware of "how baseball works," as this author rather condescendingly puts it, and therefore to know that, in very meaningful senses, Cabrera just didn't come close to having as good a season as Trout, and yet to think that this does not settle the MVP case. Wins Above Replacement can claim, or at least come close to claiming, a rather natural monopoly on being the appropriate subject of analysis from the General Manager's vantage-point, i.e. in asking, which player will increase my team's win total by the most next year? But there's no particular reason to think that the GM mindset is the implicit criterion for the Most Valuable Player Award. And while I don't think it makes sense, for instance, to deny a pitcher the Cy Young Award because, while you cannot deny that their results were the best in the league, you dislike aesthetically their style of pitching, I do think it reasonable to say that the Triple Crown has a certain magic to it, that it constitutes a valid "intangible" which justifies, under the standard of reasonableness, a vote for Cabrera over Trout.

Now, I do agree with the article's actual proposal, though it's a proposal that's never really made explicitly. The BBWAA's voting system does empower people with relatively traditionalist and non-statistical approaches to these issues, and thereby loses out on what the sabermetric types have to offer. It would be nice if this were different, not particularly because the statheads are right (although they are pretty clearly right on the facts and, I think, more often than not right in their interpretations of those facts) but because everyone should benefit from broadening the set of voices which are amplified and empowered. But this problem doesn't mean that the Cabrera for MVP cause was absurd, or that supporting it makes you a reactionary and a fool, or that it makes you equivalent to the old white men who supported Mitt Romney.