Tradition! How Did Baseball Get RBIs vs. Runs Wrong for a Century?

During the 20th Century, baseball wisdom tended to value Runs Batted In over Runs Scored despite no theoretical justification. How come?

I was going to write a high-minded philosophy of science post about how one of the main arguments behind the Race Does Not Exist conventional wisdom:

… there is more genetic variation within a single population subgroup than between two different population subgroups.

… would also prove that Team Does Not Exist because there is more variation with a single baseball team than between two different teams.

For example, the 2024 World Series-winning Los Angeles Dodgers were feared during the off-season to be ruining baseball by signing the best free agents, both in America and Japan. The Dodgers have a huge market (5% of the U.S. population lives in the 5 SoCal counties) and, over the last decade, smart management. So since 2017 they’ve been on a tear exceeded only by the great New York Yankees teams of the Babe Ruth to Mickey Mantle eras. They’ve managed to win two of the last eight World Series.

But 56 games into the 2025 regular season (35% of the 162 game season), the Dodgers are only a good but not great 34-22 because a huge number of their pitchers are hurt. Still, their six best hitters have performed up to expectations, so they are scoring a lot of runs (which they need).

To compare the mighty (at least in payroll and repute) Dodgers to the historically horrible Colorado Rockies (9-47), I looked around for a simple-to-grasp measure that could be used both for individual players and the whole team and settled upon runs scored per game.

But then … I got distracted by observing that Japanese superstar Shohei Ohtani has scored 59 runs in the first 56 games of the Dodgers’ 162 game baseball season (in 54 of which he’s played), putting him on pace for 171 runs, the most since Babe Ruth’s 1921 season.

In contrast, the mighty Aaron Judge (6’7” and 282 pounds) of the New York Yankees is batting a stratospheric .391 with almost as many homers as Ohtani (18 to Ohtani’s 20), but is on pace for a mere 150 runs (through Wednesday).

“Mere” is intended sarcastically. By the way, the last three players to reach 150 or more runs in one season were Jeff Bagwell in 2000, Ted Williams in 1949 and Joe DiMaggio in 1937.

Generally speaking, if you have a good point to make, you can often find famous examples to illustrate it that even readers with the most casual interest in the subject have heard of: granted, Bagwell, while a Hall of Famer, is relatively obscure. But the names Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio, and Ted Williams ought to be recognized by Americans with even the most casual interest in sports history or merely in the popular culture of the 20th Century.

Similarly, Ohtani and Judge are obviously the two greatest baseball players of the current decade.

As I may have mentioned once or twice over the years, Ohtani is also a pitcher, for which he’s endlessly compared to Babe Ruth who both pitched and hit homers in 1918-19, before moving permanently to the outfield.

Ohtani hasn’t pitched since 2023, when he got his second Tommy John surgery. But he threw a batting practice session a few days ago and reached 97 miles per hour. The Dodgers aren’t hurrying his return to the mound, presumably because they want him to pitch in the post-season and they don’t want him to blow out his arm again in a less-important mid-season game.

Runs Scored was long under-valued relative to Runs Batted In, especially in Most Valuable Player voting, although in theory and practice they seem highly comparable in worth.

I think the reason RBIs were glamorized more is because …

Paywall here.