GWRBI Disappears From the Boxscores

Something is missing. Gone forever from baseball.

Vanished without a trace. Eliminated from the boxscore, erased from the record books.

No tears, and mostly sneers. The poor little thing never found a home and now it’s dead, buried without a funeral.

Goodbye, GWRBI.

“It’s gone?” Mark McGwire asked. “That’s too bad.”

McGwire, like many, didn’t even know the game-winning run batted in disappeared. Men in suits decided to kill it this season and wrote it out of existance.

“Good. It was an absolutely ridiculous statistic,” Mike Schmidt said. “I believe in the potential of the stat, but not the way it was.”

Truth be told, no one really liked it. Most folks thought the GWRBI was cheap and tainted.

“I think everyone felt it was something that never quite hit the mark,” said Bill Murray, chairman of baseball’s Playing Rules Committee. The group made it official over the winter, without fanfare.

Established in 1980, the GWRBI went to the player who drove in the run that put his team ahead for good. That might be a grand slam in the bottom of the ninth inning for a 10-9 victory or a weak grounder in the top of the first in a 13-0 blowout.

“It could have been a better stat, maybe for something from the seventh inning on,” Keith Hernandez said.

Hernandez holds the all-time record, and always will, with 129 GWRBI. He set the single-season mark with 24 in 1985 with the New York Mets. “If you win 10-0, you shouldn’t have one. You hit a sacrifice fly in the first inning, there’s not that kind of pressure early in the game,” he said. “Still, it’s nice to be the leader. I’m sure I have a lot of legitimate ones mixed in with the other ones.”

Eddie Murray is, and was, second with 117.

“It was misleading at times,” he said.

Maybe the GWRBI didn’t present an accurate picture. But the best hitters always seemed to get them.

Look at the top five in each league last season: Mike Greenwell with 23, McGwire, George Bell, Jose Canseco and Jack Clark in the American League; Eric Davis with 21, Kevin McReynolds, Andres Galarraga, Andy Van Slyke and Darryl Strawberry in the National League.

Not for everyone. Rafael Palmeiro, second in the NL with a .307 average, didn’t get any. He and Alan Wiggins are the only players to qualify for the batting title without a single GWRBI in a season.

“And it sure didn’t mean much if you batted ninth,” said Bob Boone, a last-place hitter throughout his career.

George Brett saw no use for the number. That is, not unless he intended to use his GWRBI totals in a salary arbitration hearing.

“I just think it’s a stupid stat,” Brett said. “I could understand having it for games that are won from the sixth inning on. But who’s going to decide what the game-winner is before that?”

McGwire, with 20 GWRBI last season, said he liked it, sort of.

“There should be one. Maybe it could be treated like a save,” he said. “It could start in the seventh inning and be used in games decided by three runs or less.”