Baseball Stupidity: Debunking the Game's Most Outdated Cliches

What are some of baseball's dumbest aphorisms? Let us educate ourselves:

RBI

OK, it’s been several decades since the RBI statistic was completely discredited, yet it’s still being used by the members of the media and many fans.

Listen up people, an RBI is the product of the people around the hitter who gets the RBI. The hitter has no control over whether there are people on base or not when they have plate appearances. Let’s use OPS instead, it’s simple, it’s intuitive, and it actually correlates to run production.

“Speed never takes a day off”

Fair enough, but even when speed is working hard, it’s barely making any impact on the result of the game. Yes, a stolen base has value. Unfortunately, getting caught trying to steal a base once will wipe out the gains from successfully stealing two bases.

OPS, which has nothing to do with baserunning, predicts the number of runs a team will score with 96% accuracy.

“Innings eater”

Anyone can eat innings, if you don’t care about results. Even in home run derbies, guys will miss balls. There are hundreds of competent Triple-A pitchers who could fill the role of “innings eater.” We should be interested in the quality of the innings, not the quantity.

“He’s a Clutch Hitter”

The clutch hitter belongs in the same category as UFOs and Bigfoot. The burden of proof is on those claiming it exists. Simply saying someone is a clutch hitter based on a small sample size of at-bats doesn’t meet the requirement. Sabermetricians have been searching for the beast “Clutch Hitter” for a long time and have yet to find it.

“Force the defense to make the play”

The most precious thing a team has in a baseball games are its outs. A team is given 27 outs to score as many runs as it possibly can. Sacrificing those outs in an act of bravado is stupid. Only late in close games should you be willing to risk outs trying to gain an extra base.

“He Handles the bat well”

You know what, I don’t care how someone handles there bat, can they hit?

“Get your cuts”

This normally said to someone as an encouragement when they’re hitting. Well, I don’t want to see my guy flailing away at the plate “getting their cuts.” A disciplined approach at the plate should be what is encouraged, though yelling “plate discipline” doesn’t have quite the ring to it.

“Pitch him high and tight, then low and away”

Pitching is about deception. A pitcher is there to try to fool a batter. A batter who is fooled generally doesn’t hit well. Unfortunately, pitching someone high and tight doesn’t fool anyone. Pitchers who are effective generally have great breaking stuff which entices batters to swing as the ball takes a dive out of the strike zone.