The Pecan Park Eagle

Craig Biggio (# 155t) and Jeff Bagwell (# 45t) Rank Among Leaders.

Craig Biggio was never your prototypical RBI man, but he played well enough over time to end up at # 155 in a tie with HOF great George Sisler with 1,175 RBI each. Jeff Bagwell made a deeper push up the list as a legitimate power hitter, stopped cold at the # 45 spot, tied with another HOF great one,  Tris Speaker, for now, by his unfixable shoulder problem in 2005 from going higher on the all time leader board.

Most of those other names in the top ten for “runs batted in” (RBI) will not surprise, but the old racist Cap Anson at the # 3 spot may raise a few eyebrows. Anson did his work in the 19th century, when and  where the different rules and accuracy of record-keeping often casts a shadow upon the achievements of that period in comparison to the same accomplishments in the modern game.

In spite of our several more recent and more sophisticated measures of productivity, I’ve always been most partial to the RBI figure because it tells us very directly whether or not a player is causing runs to score in comparison to others. The game is still about who scores the most runs. As long as the team that scores the most runs in the final game of the World Series is declared champion, we shall need to keep our attention upon the interesting RBI column – and those players who are most responsible for banging home the bacon.

Listed here are simply the top 100 RBI men of all time. If you would care to study the all time list deeper, heres the link to the material source at Baseball Reference.Com:

http://www.baseball-reference.com/leaders/RBI_career.shtml

Top 100 All Time Career MLB RBI Leaders (Through 2010):

“+” by name = inducted member of Baseball Hall of Fame.

Tags: Baseball, History, RBI Leaders

This entry was posted on November 8, 2010 at 12:59 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.