Taking a Closer Look at Hitting with Runners in Scoring Position

In baseball, part of what is commonly debated is how important it is to hit with runners in scoring position. Viewers of their teams will often have their sad sigh when their team leaves runners stranded in scoring position and will look up how their team does in those situations and say, “this is why we don’t score runs” or “this is why we don’t win games.” They will also look at other teams and see how good of an offense the other team might have and immediately make the assumption that they are going to be better at hitting with runners in scoring position than most other teams if their offense is better. But just how much of a team’s success is based on hitting with runners in scoring position and how much of hitting with runners in scoring position is based on team success?

I. Impact of Hitting with Runners in Scoring Position

One of the old clichés in baseball is, “you can’t win without hitting with runners in scoring position.” Many people link that to why the Cardinals had done so well in the past and why they haven’t really been able to get going this year. In years past, they have consistently been not only one of the best teams in baseball, but also the best at hitting with runners in scoring position.

Many people in the game consider it also to be one of the most important stats when it comes to judging a player’s hitting ability. In a press conference at the beginning of the season, Matt Williams had sabermetricians finally thinking that someone with their ideology was becoming the manager of the Washington Nationals when he said, “If you don’t get with the times, bro, you better step aside.” When I heard that, I immediately thought that he would be talking about more advanced hitting metrics than batting average and home runs and RBI’s. He followed that comment up with, “My favorite stat right now and always has been the stat of hitting with runners in scoring position. Because batting average and on-base percentage and all of those things are great, but who is doing damage and how can they hit with guys in scoring position.” When I heard that, I immediately slunked back in my chair and placed him in the category of old-school.

And listening to one of the Reds games (as I always do), listening to Marty Brennaman (who I think is a good broadcaster for his catchy phrases and also because he’s from where I’m from), I heard him talk about Votto and he said, “Votto will take a 3-0 pitch an inch off the outside corner, when he could do with it what he did Wednesday. I believe in expanding your strike zone when you’ve got guys on base.” For those who don’t know, what he did on Wednesday (a while ago), was drive a 3-0 pitch from Matt Harvey (that shows how long ago it was) for a home run to left field in New York. Unfortunately, for a while now Marty Brennaman has been seemingly leading a war of the old-school against his own team’s star first baseman Joey Votto over hitting. Namely hitting with runners in scoring position or men on base. Again, while listening, I slide back in my chair, disappointed in Marty for being so illusioned and confused and broadcasting his wrong opinion to many of the people who listen to him on the radio.

Williams and Brennaman aren’t the only people that have this mindset though. The thing that they and many other people think is that if you can’t hit with runners in scoring position, you can’t win games and you can’t score runs. For these people, it is for the most part a blind hypothesis, just assuming it is true because it seems that it should be true.

For examining this data, I am going to look at the coefficient of determination, or R2 (I have below this the formula for R, correlation coefficient, that when squared equals the coefficient of determination). For those who don’t know, when looking at the data and calculating a formula of best fit, R2 shows a percentage value of how many of the samples of the x-value fit the line of best fit (the line that in perfect situations can calculate the y-values). I am going to call the dependent variable, or y-value, wins and runs and the independent variable, or x-value, the various offensive statistics that I will use to test my hypothesis (hitting with runners in scoring position does not have much to do with determining how many wins a team gets in a season or how many runs a team scores). Basically it is how dependent team wins and runs are on hitting with runners in scoring position. Before I look at hitting with runners in scoring position, it is important to establish which three offensive statistics are the best at determining wins and runs.

In terms of influencing the scoring of runs from 2002 to 2013, the three best offensive statistics are:

1. OPS with an R2 of .9132 (91% of the OPS x-values fit the formula: y = 2059.2x – 791.27)
2. ISO with an R2 of .5801 (58% of the ISO x-values fit the formula: y = 3279.75x + 238.02)
3. wOBA with an R2 of .3999 (40% of the wOBA x-values fit the formula: y = 3482.9x – 389.93).

When it comes to which statistics determine wins the most, the three best statistics are:

1. WAR with an R2 of .5329 (53% of the WAR x-values fit the formula: y = 1.1243x + 59.614)
2. wRC+ with an R2 of .4302 (43% of the wRC+ x-values fit the formula: y = 0.8977x – 5.4636)
3. wRAA with an R2 of .3632 (36% of the wRAA x-values fit the formula: y = 0.1033x + 81.239)

There are a couple things to notice when looking at this data. One of those things is that most offensive statistics have a much weaker coefficient of determination when looking at wins, largely in part to the fact that pitching is kept completely out of the equation. Another thing to know is that if there was a bigger sample size, the R2 values would be different but using this sample size (which I will use for RISP), these are the R2 values that show up.

The purpose behind collecting those statistics in terms of offense in general as opposed to just RISP is because this way there will be statistics to use when looking at how much RISP influences offense. Looking at determining runs scored in an overall season with RISP numbers:

1. OPS has an R2 of .3099 (31% of the OPS x-values fit the formula: y = 948.7x + 19.173)
2. ISO has an R2 of .2395 (24% of the ISO x-values fit the formula: y = 1812.2x + 470.92)
3. wOBA has an R2 of .2898 (29% of the wOBA x-values fit the formula: y = 2391.5x – 35.754)

It is quite a dramatic change, especially when looking at OPS that clearly had a big hand in determining runs scored in a season. While some of them still have some modest effect in determining runs scored, it is still not quite at the same level as those that covered a full season and not just a given scenario. Now looking at how those other statistics determine wins with runners in scoring position:

1. WAR has an R2 of .29 (29% of the WAR x-values fit the formula: y = 2.5609x + 68.94)
2. wRC+ has an R2 of .2739 (27% of the wRC+ x-values fit the formula: y = 0.5518x + 27.727)
3. wRAA has an R2 of .2366 (24% of the wRAA x-values fit the formula: y = 0.2366x + 80.996)

As I had mentioned before, it should be expected that these numbers ought to be low because there is much more that goes into a win than just offensive ability. There has to be great pitching too that is not put into account. With that said, these numbers are quite far from being great in determining wins as is evidenced by their still being far away from even the 50% mark that they should be close to.

For Matt Williams’ sake, I also looked at how much batting average with runners in scoring position determines wins and runs:

1. For scoring runs, AVG has R2 value of .181 (18% of AVG x-values fit the formula: y = 2005.8x + 213.05)
2. For wins, AVG has R2 of .1427 (14% of AVG x-values fit the formula: y = 257.76x + 13.255)

So Matt, not to rain on your parade, but batting average with runners in scoring position has very little to do with determining runs or wins. And Marty, it’s just limiting Votto’s overall production to a small sample size that doesn’t have a whole lot to do with winning games. No one will argue that hitting with runners in scoring position can help to win games because it does often result in scoring a run but it should not be looked at as one of the key stats in a player’s production.
II. Is it dependent on overall strength of offense?

Now back to those St. Louis Cardinals. Last year, with runners in scoring position, they put up not only unreal numbers, they put up numbers that are really just plain stupid. I mean, they batted .330 with runners in scoring position, had a .370 wOBA, and a 138 wRC+, and won 97 games, 32 games over .500. Like I have previously established, those numbers are intrinsically worthless considering that it is such a small sample size but those are still just gaudy numbers. This year, for lack of a better word, they’re awful with runners in scoring position. A .244 batting average, .293 wOBA, and 86 wRC+ all those with runners on second or third and have won 39 games, only 4 over .500.

Many people look at that and think that clearly, their inability to hit with runners in scoring position this year has caused the drop off in production. Of course, the low .303 wOBA, 92 wRC+, OPS of .681, and AVG of .250 are a bit of a drop off from the .322 wOBA, 106 wRC+, .733 OPS, and .269 AVG of last year might have something to do with that drop off in offense too. The Cardinals offense is also scoring about a run less this year than they did last year (4.83 Runs/9 innings in 2013 and 3.67 Runs/9 innings in 2014) meanwhile their pitching has practically been identical to last year with a FIP of 3.31, xFIP of 3.66, and SIERA of 3.60 this season compared to last year’s 3.39 FIP, 3.63 xFIP, and SIERA of 3.57. But is hitting with runners in scoring position dependent on how the offense overall is? I’m sure you can already see what coefficient we’re going back to.

The process was similar to last time, with the dependent variable, or y-value, being hitting with runners in scoring position, and the independent variable, or x-value, being the same statistic only looking at the value over the course of a full season. I found that wRC in a year has by far the strongest effect in determining how a team hits with RISP with an R2 of .7527 with 75% of the x-values fitting into the equation of y = 0.3364x – 51.232. OPS is after that with an R2 of .6487 and 65% of the x-values fitting the equation of y = 1.0184x + 0.0025. And then there is wOBA that has an R2 of .6258 and 63% of the x-values fitting the equation of y = 0.9807x + 0.0062. Some other values are:

• wRAA that has an R2 of .5811 (58% of the x-values fit into the equation: y = 0.2586 + 0.5721)
• wRC+ that has an R2 of .5558 (56% of the x-values fit into the equation: y = 0.9678x + 3.3038)
• WAR that has an R2 of .3831 (38% of the x-values fit into the equation: y = 0.2005x + 0.8901)

So a case could be made that the strength of a team’s offense overall does dictate how that same team hits with runners in scoring position. While by no means is it an overwhelmingly strong coefficient of determination in any of the cases, in most cases the strength of an offense determines at least 50% of hitting with runners in scoring position which is good enough to at the very least say that better offensive teams are more likely to hit better with runners in scoring position than weak offensive teams.