Henry Aaron and the RBI
An essay about ignorance and arrogance that non-Baseball Fans can enjoy...maybe...
A while back I wrote about some of the famous people who died in 2021 and one of them was Henry Aaron and because I write in a “flood of consciousness” style (“stream of consciousness” doesn’t do my brain’s meandering activity justice) I had a lengthy digression about Runs Batted In because Henry is the all-time leader with 2,297, but the article about Dead Celebrities was already way too long so I threw out the part about RBIs like a hot air balloonist trying to clear some inconveniently-placed power lines and now that I write that down, “hot air” seems like an uncomfortably-accurate description of my writing.
OK, I’ll wait here while you go back and work your way through that run-on sentence.
All caught up?
Good.
So here’s what I had to say about RBIs and since I have some readers who complain that I don’t write about baseball enough, this ought to make them happy for about five minutes which is actually my Personal Best for Making Somebody Else Happy and if that makes me seem kinda self-centered you should know my Personal Best for Making Me Happy is about three-and-a-half minutes, so we’re all pretty unhappy with me and I think it’s high time everybody gets used to it.
As that great American philosopher Popeye would say:
“I yam what I yam.”
A Lengthy But Somewhat Amusing Digression about RBIs
One of the pitfalls of being smarter than average (which, when you think about how we’ve reacted to the pandemic, isn’t all that impressive) is thinking you’re smarter than everybody else and don’t need to listen to anybody, which is a pretty good indication you’re not quite as smart as you think.
As someone once said:
“If you already know everything you can’t learn anything.”
(BTW: That someone was me and if somebody else said it before I did, they probably ought to start a blog and take credit.)
In any case…
A West Point graduate who studied military history might want to listen to a private with a GED if that private has some actual This-Is-What-You-Should-Do-When-People-Start-Shooting-At-You combat experience the West Point graduate lacks.
I was lucky because before I ever started writing about baseball I accidentally got exposed to professional ballplayers and they knocked all the Baseball Arrogance out of me by constantly demonstrating they knew way more about the game than I did.
(Another BTW: Baseball Arrogance is a disease contracted almost exclusively by American Males who think they know the game because they’ve been around it all their lives which is kind of like thinking you know how to build a rocket ship because you live next door to MIT.)
Anyway…
When I started covering baseball I approached it with the attitude that the players knew more than I did and I just wanted to know what they knew and then share that knowledge with fans and most of the players appreciated that approach because way too often the media approaches players with an attitude that could best be described as:
“I-Already-Know-What-I-Think-And-The-Article-Is-96-Percent-Finished-And-I-Just-Need-A-Few-Quotes-To-Go-With-It-So-Please-Say-What-I-Need-You-To-Say.”
And unfortunately for them a lot of analytics advocates haven’t hung out with Big League Ballplayers and these AA members (a label that may or may not seem appropriate, depending on the severity of your drinking problem) have convinced themselves they already know everything worth knowing so why would you listen to some Lifetime .236 Hitter with tobacco juice on his chin?
Ummm…maybe because that Lifetime .236 Hitter with tobacco juice on his chin knows some stuff you don’t.
Finally we get to the stuff about RBIs
One of the most ignorant and arrogant beliefs of many analytics advocates is that driving in runs is not a skill; it’s a reflection of your teammates’ ability to get on base and, if at all possible, into scoring position.
But when I asked Kansas City Royals coach Rusty Kuntz, a .236 Lifetime Hitter (although Rusty doesn’t chew tobacco so he just screwed up my image) what he thought about the “driving in runs is not a skill” theory, Rusty asked how many times someone drives in 100 runs without hitting at least 20 homers.
I looked it up and the answer is: not very goddamn often.
So if hitting home runs is a skill that means a pretty good percentage of runs driven in are skill-based. Henry Aaron drove in 100 or more runs in 11 seasons and never did it without hitting at least 20 homers and the actual average of home runs in a Hank Aaron 100 RBI season was just a fraction over 40.
Henry Aaron drove in 2,297 runs and hit 755 homers and even if they were all solo shots (and they weren’t) that means at least a third of Hank Aaron’s RBIs were skill-based and if you add add the runners that were on base when Henry homered, the actual number is much higher.
And for those of you have never stood at the plate with runners on base (which seems to include the vast majority of analytics advocates) situational hitting is yet another skill.
The Lost Art of Situational Hitting
Back when players were putting up Hall of Fame numbers powered by nothing more than Chesterfields, high balls and the occasional amphetamine (the occasion usually being a day game after a night game) a hitter needed to be able to look at the defense and figure out what kind of ball in play would get a run home and then produce that kind of ball in play.
For instance:
Runner on third, less than two outs, infield in (which means a groundball might not do the trick because the infielders are standing too close to home plate) and then swing at the right pitch and produce a fly ball to the outfield.
While discussing the art of driving in runs, Rusty told me about a teammate who would stand right on top of the plate with a runner on third and less than two outs and since the hitter was crowding the plate the pitcher would fall for it and try to jam him with a fastball inside, which was exactly what this hitter wanted.
The inside fastball would produce a jam shot which would then produce a weak ground ball and even if it broke the hitter’s bat, that weak ground ball would act just like a squeeze bunt and give the runner time to scamper home and score.
It might not look like a great piece of hitting to the uninformed, but it was: it was a veteran player outthinking his opponent and doing what was best for his team.
And that kind of thinking is getting lost.
Analytic advocates have advocated hitting as many home runs as possible and many of them are now advising or running teams and helping decide how much players get paid, so you see hitters with a runner on third and less than two outs keep trying to hit one of those home runs that will get them paid and instead strike out and fail to get a ball in play at all.
Because analytics have made baseball games too long (you can impregnate a woman during the National Anthem and she’ll give birth by the Seventh-Inning Stretch) the people who run baseball — who don’t give a Rat’s Ass about tradition unless the tradition is making money — came up with that stupid “Let’s Start a Runner on Second Base During Extra Innings Rule” and having too much time on my hands I decided to see if teams that moved the runner to third base with a bunt or ground ball to the right side had a better chance of scoring a run than teams that just kept swinging away.
I discovered three things:
Because it’s fallen out of favor and they don’t do it much, a lot of players can’t bunt for shit and then fail when their manager panics and asks them to put one down under pressure.
Teams that did move the runner to third with less than two outs were often disappointed when the guy at the plate failed to get the ball in play because he hasn’t worked at that skill and was still swinging for the fences, which is what the analytics advocates told him to do.
Looking up stats is really, really boring.
In conclusion
Driving in runs is definitely a skill and nobody was better at it than Henry Aaron and all you have to do is talk to the guys who have actually stood on dirt and played or coached baseball to know that because they’ll blow your pet theories out of the water with a logical question like:
“How often does a guy drive in 100 runs without hitting 20 homers?”
Baseball has taught me a lot and right up there at the top of the list is the following conclusion and you might want to write this down just in case you want to quote it later:
You can be either ignorant or arrogant, but you probably ought to avoid being both at the same time.
Henry Aaron and the RBI
P.S. I should probably mention I made the same point (well, actually, it was Rusty's point) about the connection between home runs and RBIs in an article for the Star several years ago, but the Star version did not have the jokes, insults and mild profanity that you've come to expect so this one is way better and I was reminded of all this when Hank Aaron died and thought the point was worth making again.
To reiterate your final point in female vernacular…
“Ain’t nothin’ gonna go wrong so long as you don’t make like you know somethin’ you don’t.” ~Fauna Flood, local madam and wise woman, Cannery Row