Bill James Handbook 2013 Leaderboards

The Bill James Handbook 2013 has 34 pages of leaderboards, many of which cannot be found anywhere else. Here are few of them.

RBI Percentage describes the rate at which a hitter drives in runs when he bats with men on base.

• While Miguel Cabrera outpaced Mike Trout by 56 RBI, the two were nearly identical in their percentage of RBI per opportunity at 43.88 percent and 43.07 percent, respectively.
• Garrett Jones and Andrew McCutchen combined for 182 of the Pirates’ 620 RBI, nearly 30 percent of the team’s total production.
• Miguel Cabrera and Prince Fielder combined for 247 of the Tigers’ 698 RBI, which is more than 35 percent.

• Cabrera did not lead our RBI Percentage list, but he was well clear of the field with 46 lead changing RBI.
• Adam Jones and Garrett Jones were the only two players in the top-10 with fewer than 90 total RBI.

• With so many opportunities to drive in runs, it is not a huge surprise that Miguel Cabrera also led baseball with 28 GIDPs.
• The top-nine hitters are all from the American League.

Four of the 10 leaders are catchers.

• Josh Hamilton’s extreme highs and extreme lows in 2012 may have something to do with his hyper-aggressiveness on the first pitch of each at-bat. From the beginning of the season through May, Hamilton hit .368 with 21 home runs. In June and July, he hit .202 with just eight home runs.
• The Nationals have three players—Ian Desmond, Danny Espinosa, and Bryce Harper—in the top-11. Patience at the plate is clearly not a priority for them.

Surprisingly, despite his low first-pitch swing percentage, J.J. Hardy only had a .282 on-base percentage in 2012. Every other player on this list had an on-base percentage at least 50 points higher (Teixeira second lowest at .332), each one of them significantly above MLB’s overall on-base percentage of .319.