I'm with you, although defining opportunity is hard. They don't award the batting title to the player with the most hits. However the player with the most hits is almost certainly a very good hitter. Likewise anyone who leads the league in RBI, or even reaches the 100 level, is surely a good hitter, with all the necessary clutchness we want. So the fans who judge by RBI aren't wrong, when they look at the high end of the rankings. It's the players who don't get many RBI who you want to take a closer look at before dismissing - maybe they bat leadoff or ninth, or maybe their team is bad and there weren't many ducks on the pond over the course of the season, or maybe the opportunities just didn't even out over the course of a particular season. Runs are the coin of the realm, so celebrating the Run and the RBI stat makes perfect sense. But if 3 singles in an inning lead to 1 run, the first guy gets credit, the third guy gets different credit, and the second guy is a bum. With hits, it's easy to define opportunity, either as AB if you want batting average, or combined with walks for OBP using PA as the denominator of the fraction. For RBI, it's a lot harder to break down - a man-on-first opportunity with 2 out is not the same as bases loaded (or even anybody on third with less than 2 out) - thus a simple denominator is hard to conjure up.