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Just a little noodling about what an RBI means and what it doesn't.  Thinking about what Jean Segura's .499 SLG would mean to the Safeco scoreboard.  BJOL has an interesting revisit of RBI's at the top of the page right now.  James asks a dozen questions about RBI men, and number six was:

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... Jean Segura had more at bats than Encarnacion did in 2016, more hits, and exactly the same number of total bases as Encarnacion (318 each)—

but drove in only half as many runs.    To what extent did Encarnacion drive in more runs than Segura because he had more chances to drive in runs, and to what extent was it because he was a better RBI man?   Do you think it was 70% because Encarnacion was a better RBI man, or 30%?

Of the 63 RBI difference between them, 40 were because Encarnacion had more chances to drive in runs, and the rest were because Encarnacion hit 42 homers to Segura’s 20, and a Home Run is also an RBI.   Setting aside the larger number of RBI Opportunities for Encarnacion and the fact that he drove in himself 22 more times with homers, they were otherwise the same as RBI men. 

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1) James came up with a new way to measure "RBI chances."  Man on 3B, 0 or 1 out is a "full RBI opportunity," 1.0 chances for an RBI.  1.0 means only that it's the baseline for the lesser RBI situations.  All runners on 2B, and all runners on 3B if two are out, count 70% of that, 0.7 opportunities.  Any runner on 1B is 0.4 full-blown RBI chances for the hitter.  And the batter himself is 0.1 chances, if he hits a home run.

The idea is to measure opportunties that are "fair" to all kinds of hitters - so that you can see whether some hitter or other is good at producing RBI.

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1a) Of course all HR hitters are better at the 0.1 opportunity.  Homers are good.

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2) The average ML hitter knocks in 30% of his opportunities, "bats" .304 for knocking teammates in.  The range is .206 to .435 -- the worst over the previous 8 years is our pal Chone Figgins at .206 per opportunity; the best is Mike Trout at .435.  Wow.

With this scale in mind, Edwin Encarnacion clocked a raging .391 the last 8 years, 17th in baseball just behind Giancarlo Stanton.  Encarnacion's RBI production was actually down a bit last year, but he got many more chances.

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3) The guys in the middle of the order (MOTO) might get about 300 chances on James' scale; the guy hitting #9 will get about 200.  Here are the averages per lineup slot:

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About ten to fifteen runs in theory, although in practice that is probably an overstatement.   A typical team has about 2200 RBI opportunities in a season, which are arranged high to low something like this:

              And a typical team has RBI producers of varying ability, something like this:

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4) Encarnacion drove HIMSELF in 20 more times than Jean Segura did; except for that, the other 107 vs 44 RBI were just a matter of Encarnacion having over 2x the number of ducks on the pond.

That doesn't mean that RBI are meaningless.  These happen to be two players who were equally good at RBI.  Caleb Joseph had 0 RBI last year in 132 AB's.  That's the worst all-time, and the next thirty men on the list were pitchers.

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5)  With 318 total bases last year, Jean Segura was one of the top RBI men in baseball, in terms of knocking TEAMMATES in.  But!  Segura with his .368 OBP and 33 stolen bases was a very fine RUN scorer also.

In Zen terms:  some players, you're happy to have them lead off an inning, and you're happy to have them up fourth in the inning.

Enjoy,

Dr D