Thanks to regular poster Richard Chester for contributing this article and analysis. Richard is a long-time Yankees follower with many stories to tell of days at the Stadium.

Derek Jeter has been piling on the hits this year and attention has been focused on his climb up the ladder of the lifetime hits leader board. Not often observed is his relatively low RBI total, even for a leadoff hitter. As of the date of this writing, 8/2/2012, he is projected to accumulate  213 hits and 50 RBIs. This would out him into a not-so-desirable club of players with 200 or more hits and no more than 50 RBIs.

After the jump, I’ll look some more at this unusual “club”.

So, here are the club members, ordered by RBI.

At the top of the list is “club president” Lloyd Waner who somehow managed to drive in all of 27 runs with 223 hits. I have always wondered how Waner could have so few RBIs with so many hits. Data for an analysis are not available for 1927, so I settled on analyzing Richie Ashburn’s 1958 season. As you would suspect, Ashburn’s BA with RISP was low and his XBH were few.  Although his seasonal BA was .350, his BA with RISP was just .273 with 3 doubles and 2 triples. In addition quite a few of his singles failed to score a runner from second. The same reasons most likely apply for Waner’s low RBI title. He had more hits than Ashburn but fewer XBH. I would suspect that Waner came to bat with more men on base than Ashburn because the 1927 Pirates had an OBP of .361 vs. the 1958 Phils with .339.

The LOI and LOI% columns are number and percentage of PAs leading off an inning. ROB and ROB% are seasonal total runners on base and percentage of them driven in. As would be expected most of these players are team leadoff hitters, who are mostly singles hitters and follow the weakest hitters in the line-up. Three players, Fox, Pesky and Garr, were #2 hitters and Cramer split his time in the #1 and #2 spots. While most of these hitters were well into the 30% and 40% range for LOI%, two of the three #2 hitters, Nellie Fox (17.1%) and Ralph Garr (22.0%) compiled a much smaller number of LOI PAs, illustrating quite starkly the difference between batting first and second.

Meager RBI totals are due in part to similarly low totals for extra-base hits. While most of these players have even fewer XBH than RBI, those indicated in red managed an equal or lower numbers of RBI than XBH. Perhaps not coincidentally, of these all but Pete Rose had LOI% above 40%, among players for which LOI data are available.

If you’re wondering about artificial cutoffs like 50 RBI and 200 hits, here are the players since 1920 to accumulate RBI of less than 25% of Hits in qualifying seasons batting .300 with fewer than 200 hits.

The usual suspects with a few new names (but not Derek Jeter’s). Actually, Jeter has never come particularly close to that 25% cutoff. His lowest rate was 31.1% in 2009, on 66 RBI from 212 hits. So, how does this season compare to the rest of his career?

Pretty consistent until the past couple of seasons when his batting and slugging inevitably started to slide with age. As far as RBIs go, this season is looking like a blip rather than the progression of an already evident trend. Probable reason for the blip is that, so far this season, men have been on base for only 33.9% of Derek’s PAs, versus his career mark of 41.4%.