RBI or RBIs

Something has been bothering me all season. Maybe it was going on before this season but I never noticed it. When did it become normal to say “he has 100 RBI”?

More than 1 RBI is plural so add the damn “s”.

Shouldn’t it be “RBIs”? Yes it should. It seems that it is OK to say it the first way but I wouldn’t say that it is normal and it really does sound ridiculous. It seems a little bit pretentious to me. Are the people who do this just grammar nuts?

You know the type, always correcting your grammar never lettin’ anything slide.

Do you say “the terrorist had 5 WMD”? No you say “he had 5 WMDs”.


Here is an excerpt from an article on this issue.

"Some abbreviations have embedded plural forms, and there are often inconsistencies in creating the plurals of these words. The speed of an internal combustion engine is measured in "revolutions per minute" or rpm (lower case) and the efficiency of an automobile is reported in "miles per gallon" or mpg (no "-s" endings). On the other hand, baseball players love to accumulate "runs batted in," a statistic that is usually reported as RBIs (although it would not be terribly unusual to hear that someone got 100 RBI last year — and some baseball commentators will talk about "ribbies," too). Also, the U.S. military provides "meals ready to eat" and those rations are usually described as MREs (not MRE). When an abbreviation can be used to refer to a singular thing — a run batted in, a meal ready-to-eat, a prisoner of war — it's surely a good idea to form the plural by adding "s" to the abbreviation: RBIs, MREs, POWs. (Notice that no apostrophe is involved in the formation of these plurals. Whether abbreviations like these are formed with upper- or lower-case letters is a matter of great mystery; only your dictionary editor knows for sure.)"