I just got curious to see how many RBI the top HR-hitters average per HR. Let me show you what I mean.

I'm starting with the B-R page for 2009 batting leaders. The current HR leaders are:

Gee, Pujols on top of a leaders list. Who'dve thunk it?

Anyway, let's look up how many RBI each guy has on his homers so far this year.

The easiest way to do that is go to the event finder for each guy (here is Pujols', for example) and look up his 2009 homers. If you check out that result, you can see that Pujols has 76 RBI on his 47 HR.

Let me summarize the results for each guy:

Pujols: 76/47 = 1.62 RBI/HR
Reynolds 67/43 = 1.56 RBI/HR
Howard 79/41 = 1.93 RBI/HR
Fielder 71/40 = 1.78 RBI/HR
Pena 61/39 = 1.56 RBI/HR
Gonzalez 57/39 = 1.46 RBI/HR
Dunn 63/37 = 1.70 RBI/HR
Teixeira 56/37 = 1.51 RBI/HR
Bay 63/36 = 1.75 RBI/HR
Werth 55/34 = 1.62 RBI/HR
Lee 55/34 = 1.62 RBI/HR

Interesting variation. Howard is pretty far out in the lead among this group, but there are so many things to consider:

• This list includes only the top HR hitters. Nothing says that a guy further down on the HR leaderboard couldn't have a higher ratio than Howard.
• This stat depends heavily on how many guys are on base when the HR hitter is batting, and obviously he has little control over that.
• It's not surprising that Howard's value is so much higher than Werth's. Werth hits further down in the same batting order as Howard, meaning that Jayson has much less benefit of the #1-#3 hitters getting on base, plus he's usually the guy batting with the bases empty after Howard homers.
• Note that this stat does have a significant affect on RBI total. Compare the lowest guy on this list, Gonzalez, to Howard. There's almost half an RBI per HR difference in their rates. That means about 20 fewer RBI for Gonzalez this year (based on his HR production of about 40.)
• I wonder if this stat is random. In other words, I'd be curious to look at the same stat for each of these guys over their careers and see if it changes a lot from year to year. I figure it probably would since it has more to do with the team than anything else, although each guy's position in the batting order (which generally stays fairly constant) probably matters a lot too.
• I want to look at this on a team-by-team basis and I'll do that later this week.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009 at 8:36 am and is filed under Event Finders. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.