With Miguel Cabrera approaching his 3,000th hit, his career is being viewed more beginning-to-end than normal, as is always the case around retirements and milestones. The crowning achievement, of course, is that 2012 Triple Crown. Right?
The Triple Crown is a funny thing, and it was funny in 2012, when we were really in the thick of baseball’s transition from traditional metrics—ones whose meaning was widely-known—to advanced metrics—ones more descriptive of players’ true ability and value. Those latter metrics say Cabrera was actually better in 2013. 8.6 fWAR, compared to 7.3 in 2012. 193 wRC+, compared to 166 in 2012. “But it was the Triple Crown!” some cry. And they are right.
Among other things, the Triple Crown is a good gut check. If someone wins the Triple Crown in baseball—something only Cabrera has done in the last 55 years—and your reaction is to “well, actually” it, you have jumped the statistical shark. The Triple Crown is cool. And it’s not meaningless.
Yes, you can have better years and not win the Triple Crown. That’s not the argument here. Cabrera’s 2013 was more impressive. Cabrera’s 2012 was more special. The Triple Crown is a phenomenal individual feat, but it’s also a connection to history. Plenty of people have had great seasons. Only Cabrera, Carl Yastrzemski, Frank Robinson, Mickey Mantle, and Ted Williams have won the Triple Crown since players returned from the European and Pacific Theaters.
We also, at times, go too far in our dismissal of two legs of the Triple Crown (thankfully, our historic agreement that home runs are great has gone unchallenged but for Joe Morgan [RIP] being given access to too many television screens in the 2000’s). Batting average and RBI aren’t the most telling stats, either about a player’s ability or their impact, but they’re not meaningless. In 2021, the correlation coefficient between batting average and the offensive component of fWAR was 0.59. That’s a reasonably strong positive correlation. The correlation coefficient between RBI and FanGraphs’s Win Probability Added was 0.60. Also a reasonably strong positive correlation (graphs at the bottom on those, by the way). RBI gets at the idea of situational impact—how much a player meant to their team offensively. Batting average gets at the idea of performance in a vacuum—how good a player was. Neither are perfect, but honestly, they’re pretty impressive given how long they’ve been around. There’s nothing wrong with batting average or RBI, as stats. The Major League batting average leader last year, Trea Turner, who hit .328, was sixth in the offensive component of fWAR. The Major League RBI leader, Salvador Perez, was ninth in WPA. Coincidentally, Turner and Perez are two of the game’s most fun players. They’re two of the biggest stars of the sport. Batting average and RBI aren’t great stats, but they’re good numbers, especially because a casual fan knows that .328 is good and that 121 RBI is a lot of RBI.
It’s good and fine and fun to look for new stats, and to embrace new stats, and to try to understand the game better. But just because those reluctant to accept truth in Billy Beane’s heyday were often jackasses about it doesn’t mean we should wholly reject batting average and RBI. It especially doesn’t mean we should reject the Triple Crown.
