One of baseball’s hottest topics is what is called ‘clutch hitting’; the idea that a player somehow performs above his average when the game is on the line. Measuring 'clutch performance' is a nebulous science, at best. Ask ten firm believers in the theory and you will get ten different definitions on what exactly constitutes `clutch'. It is this conveniently shifting definition that allows for the propagation of this concept, and the cherry-picking of stats. Some people (Rex Hudler) think that 'clutch' hitting is any time a player gets a hit with men in scoring position and two outs, regardless of the inning. Others (Joe Morgan) believe that the true measure of `clutch' is getting the always-important `big hit' in a `big game' in a `big spot'. Those compiling statistics for the Major League Baseball website have attempted to nail a definition down using the numbers: including hitting with RISP, hitting with 2 outs, hitting in the seventh inning or later, and game-winning hits.
From The Sinister First Baseman by Eric Walker, "Of Black Cats and Calculators":
"Coming through in the clutch" has always been held out as one of the clearest hallmarks of a quality ball team or individual for that matter. This is one of a large number of baseball superstitions, most of which arise from a common source, a failure to grasp the elements of random-phenomenon patterns ("stochastic theory," the science types call it). Don't misunderstand me; there's a reason why the front office of baseball management may prefer to hire people who have little invested in the game of baseball to crunch some of these numbers. Again, hitting in baseball compares more to a series of Texas Hold `Em than it does to performance in a sport like football; in reality, that's not a bad comparison. No one feels the need to blame the poker player when the River card is crap; all the player can really do is make the right bets, go with the right cards, set everything up correctly. Similarly, a player can have a great at-bat, give himself every chance to get a hit, try to hit the ball as well as he can, but sometimes just has to take comfort in knowing that over the course of enough games, the hits will even out.
I think people want baseball to be like football; if a player just tries a little harder, that they can be the best, the superstar, and get the big hit at the right time. Just to clarify; we’re talking about clutch hitting here, not non-clutch hitting. You'll find players in every sport, including baseball this time, who do better in certain roles, and are set up to try too hard in pressure-filled situations. You can have a bad at-bat. If you have enough of them, you'll try too hard when you shouldn't. Baseball is not a game of robots; it's a game of human beings. BUT by the same token, it is also a game very dependent on random patterns, and you can't hold human baseball players to a physically impossible standard.
Specifically, what I'm talking about is this: Is there a quantifiable statistic that shows that a certain player (or team) has a tendency to hit really well in the "big" situations (i.e. men on base or October)? That’s up for debate. The standard answer right now is, “Not conclusively.”
When you say that a player is a "clutch hitter", this is what you are saying. You are agreeing to two conditions: that a) he somehow possesses the ability to control during which at-bats he is going to get a hit and b) that you can prove this by showing me that his numbers with runners on base or during October are statistically higher than his regular career numbers in a reasonable sample size. Very rarely do these conditions hold true.
To put it plainly, over the course of a season, for a .333 career hitter, you can reasonably expect a hit to come in roughly 200 of his 600 ABs. Depending on how much power a player has, a percentage of those will be extra-base hits. Those are his stats, spread out over a season, over a career. Players do not go to the plate saying, "I know I hit .333, so over the next few plate appearances, I need to decide wisely when to get my hit." If players could hit on command, they would get a hit just about every time they got a good pitch.
In certain respects, a baseball player is like a die. Nowadays, dice are very precisely controlled so as to be as identical as it is humanly possible to make them, but once upon a time they were merely slightly polished bits of bone; various early dice would give roughly comparable results, but no two were quite alike. A ball player's trips to the plate are very like a roll of such a die. If, let us say, a 1 or 2 comes up, it's a hit, a 3 is a walk, a 4 is a strikeout, a 5 is an infield ground-out, and a six is an outfield flyout. (These assignments don't quite approximate real percentages, and they aren't meant to; it's just a simile, and I'm sure you get the idea.) Over a few hundred rolls of such a die, one would normally get a fairly mixed succession of results, with overall results tending toward that particular slightly-irregular die's norms; but one also would see shorter-term runs of eccentric luck-an unusually high incidence of 4's, or lots of 2's, or very few 6's and so on. No sane person would say such a die has "found the groove" or is "tanking it", but when the batter's results do the same...well you know the story.
Ball players' long-term results inevitably tend toward true representations of their overall ability; short-term results inevitably fluctuate considerably from dumb, blind luck.
So what Walker is saying is that a player's career statistics are already set for the at-bat, just like the die. All that's left is to roll it. You can make sure it's on a smooth surface to get the maximum effect, you can make sure it doesn't fall off the table and ruin the roll, but other than that, that's all the control you have. Similarly, a player can have the best possible at-bat, but ultimately, the final control of the hit is out of their hands.
So how do you build a team? You get the guy with the numbers, not the "clutch" hitter. You take A-rod over Jeter every day and twice on Sundays. And for the teams without the never-ending payroll? You can't afford the guy with the huge numbers, so you have to get the guy with the batting eye and the high OBP, or any other statistic currently undervalued on the market. But you don't search for the nonexistent player who is average the rest of the season, but somehow can hit during the big moments.
Take the best hitter you can imagine. He's a career .350 hitter. The bases are loaded. It's October. He's your go-to guy. He's your superstar. The pitch is thrown. The baseball fan in you knows he's a clutch hitter. You just know that he's going to get a hit. But you're a practical baseball fan and you know the odds. Do you realize that it is absolutely more likely for this hitter to make an out than to get a hit? Somewhere inside us, we know this. Yet, weirdly, at the same time, we don't. Again, I'm not talking about him having an awful at-bat. I'm talking about him seeing every pitch, fouling some back, taking pitches that he knows he can't handle, really concentrating. Do you realize that even if he sets himself up with the greatest at-bat ever, it is STILL likely that he is going to fail to get a hit? And when he does, the comments start to fly. "No heart, no passion, he's not good in the clutch, he folds under pressure, etc etc". The truth is (and no one wants to hear this) one of his hits just did not come during that at-bat. Period.
To sum up a rather complicated math introduction, I'll just say that in order to prove that a hitter is "clutch", we need to have enough of a sample size to show that the phenomenon is not just taking place over a few at-bats, and we need to have a significant enough spike in percentage overall to prove there is a real difference. Walker did the calculations, first for a team:
A commonly adduced statistic for clutch performance is batting average with men on base versus overall average. Let's assume this team had 5600 at-bats in the season...let's also assume their overall team seasonal batting average was .250, again a reasonable norm. If we assume that fully half the time (a conservatively optimistic assumption) there is someone on base, that means 2800 such at-bats. Sparing you the actual calculations, their batting average with runners on base could then be as much as 16 points higher (.266) without being demonstrably meaningful; it would have to be fully 25 points higher (.275) to be conclusively significant. On a team basis, such performance would be extraordinary indeed! In fact, it just doesn't happen. With individual players, the case is even clearer. Remember that the result depends on the sample size. Consider a player who batted .270 overall in 600 at-bats. How high would his average with runners on base have to be to show that he is indeed a clutch performer? Again, we give the benefit and generously assume runners on fully half the time or 300 at-bats' worth. His average would then have to be .321 to even be possibly statistically significant. To be conclusively so, it would have to be an awesome .347. On a career basis (to provide some perspective), our .270 hitter after five very full years to play might have 3000 at-bats; if we again assume runners on base half the time, the key figures would be .293 for his average to even be possibly, and .304 for it to be conclusively, demonstrative of any ability to hit better with men on base. If his stats fail the lower number, we can reasonably assume that it was mere blind chance that the results from that particular selection of 1500 at-bats. To put it another way, we could have taken his at-bats on even-numbered days of the month, or on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, and have been equally likely to find 428 hits out of the 1500 at-bats so selected. Nobody, however, would refer to a great Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday hitter (I hope). Yet to most observers a .285 five-year average with runners on base for a .270 overall hitter would seem meaningful. Sill not convinced? Let's look a little deeper. Now we need to handle a bit more arithmetic, bordering on algebra (hello? hello? anyone still there?). Skipping the very lengthy why of it, it turns out that there's a formula that relates a team's batting performance closely quite closely to its runs scored. Now "classical" baseball theory (an elegant name for that superstition) says that this should be impossible. A formula can't "know" which hits or walks came with runners in scoring position or with no one on at all. It has no way to know if a team is a "good clutch-hitting team" or a bunch of sad sacks. And in fact, the derivation of the formula implicitly assumes that hits are purely random in distribution over all possible circumstances, clutch and otherwise. E pur si muove, as Galileo said. Yet it works. The median error size is about 2 ¼ percent (about 16 runs per season in the National League, 17 in the higher-scoring American League), and the average error (combining plus and minus errors) is virtually zero; errors over 5 percent are rare.
R = (H+BB) x (TB) x (4040) / (AB-H) x (AB + BB)
The fact such a formula exists and works necessarily confounds utterly any belief in "clutch" performance. That the superstition has survived so long is evidence of how, as the saying goes, a man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest. Pinch-hit homeruns are memorable, like crystal-ball predictions that come true; pinch-hit strikeouts, like unfulfilled prophecies, are dull, easily and quickly forgotten.
And no one, but no one seems to believe in the Law of Averages. When the breaks go our way, why that's just the way things happen; but when they go against us, we rail bitterly at the unfairness of it all. It's all fair, brother, it's all fair, and we have to take it as a piece, the bad with the good, the strikeouts with the hits.
And as for clutch playoff performances, let's take our cue from the New York papers. Here's what we `know' from this October: Derek Jeter is a clutch hitter and A-Rod is an October choke. Let's look at everyone's favorite `clutch hitter'. If he's the greatest playoff hitter and clutch performer ever, why does he make an out at all in October? And you can't say, "Statistics show that he can't go 45 for 45 in the playoffs". You can't bend math around what you want to believe. How is it possible that Jeter somehow knows when to hit a base hit and when to ground out? When it's important, he gets a base hit, but when it doesn't matter, he can relax and get out? And this is somehow something that A-rod hasn't yet learned? When to be clutch and when not to be? A-rod is a career .307 hitter. Does he get to choose in which at-bats those hits come? He can have good at-bats--those he can control--but no hitter can get a base hit in every situation the team needs him to, regardless of how much heart he has, how much desire he has, how much he wants to, or how hard he tries!
However, and this is key, there are certainly players who have terrible at-bats under tremendous pressure, and this should be the charge leveled at A-Rod. He isn’t going to get the big hit at all if he doesn’t have a good at-bat, and hit the ball well, and certainly there is some room for argument there. It’s called the non-clutch defense.
It's easy to label someone clutch. Just keep changing the definition, and eventually your player will fit the bill. What is clutch? Getting a hit with men on base? With two outs? In the ninth inning? In the seventh game of the ALCS? In September? October? With a man on third? When it's a one-run game and not a blowout?
One of the reasons I liked the old website Fire Joe Morgan so much, is because they get it. They understand that clutch hitting is, for all intents and purposes, a self-perpetuating myth. Example. As we all know, every hit Jeter gets that drives a man in, and every hit for him in October is called `clutch'. I'll borrow an idea from my baseball mentor, who couldn't wait to talk to me after this year's ALDS. Remember the solo homerun that Jeter hit in game five, Yanks down 3 runs? After he hit it, the announcers went CRAZY saying how 'clutch' Jeter was and what a super October player he is, of course. As you do. Ironclad guarantee: If A-rod hits that home run, it's meaningless because there was no one on base, the Yankees were losing by three and he's `unclutch' for hitting the homerun at the wrong time. Of course, any baseball fan with access to a computer can pull up some stats regarding Jeter's `clutch' playoff performances, not how people view them, but how they actually are, versus his `unclutch' teammate, A-rod.
Just to illustrate how much people don't want to believe any of this, let's take some real quotes from baseball fans about Derek Jeter and his `clutch postseason hitting':
Statistically speaking, the shortstops you mentioned have had better years than Jeter did this year. What you failed to bring into the equation are the intangibles; overall baseball knowledge, desire to win and being able to get the big hit when the team really needs it.
You do not grasp the one personality trait that causes a person to finish ahead of a seemingly more capable and talented opponent. Desire.
Championships dictate a winner!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
In a pressure spot,at crunch time, up to this point .....I'll take Jeter over anyone.
AROD might be the best player in the game......................but until he proves he can "win" Jeter is on a level of which alex has yet to attain
And the New York papers...
From the writers at Fire Joe Morgan (taking on Skip Bayless):
In pinstripes, A-Rod turns into C-minus-Rod in October.
(FJM) In last year's ALDS against Minnesota, A-Rod OPSed 1.213. In pinstripes. In October. Similar sample size to what he did this year in the ALDS. Who was writing "A-Rod = Clutch-Rod" articles after that series?
If you could pour whatever is inside Derek Jeter into A-Rod, you would have the greatest baseball player ever. But something has always been missing in A-Rod's makeup: mental toughness, guts, whatever it is that allows Barry Bonds, Albert Pujols and Manny Ramirez to make entire teams better. A-Rod doesn't seize the biggest moments. They seize him, often by the throat.
(FJM) Barry Bonds, up until 2002, was criticized as being one of the worst postseason chokers of all time. Here are his batting averages from three NLDSes and two NLCSes from the years 1990-2000:
.167 .148 .261 .250 .176
For ten years, Barry Bonds performed poorly in October. Then he did something -- regressed to the mean, perhaps, or perhaps he took some magical intangible mental toughness pills that gave him intestinal fortitude -- and he absolutely destroyed the teams he faced in the 2002 playoffs, hitting eight home runs and OPSing three million (I'm estimating).
Then, in 2003, he was terrible in the playoffs again.
Will A-Rod break out in a big way in some future playoff series? If I had to bet, I would bet the house on that happening.
This is...one who eventually could wind up with more career homers than Bonds or Hank Aaron. Yet this is a guy you wouldn't want in your October foxhole. C-minus-Rod finally made Yankees fans long for the days of a far less talented -- but far more clutch -- Scott Brosius.
(FJM) Finally. Finally you write what idiots all across Yankeeland are thinking.
Scott Brosius postseason BA /OBP / SLG: .245 / .278 / .418
Scott Brosius ALDS BA / OBP / SLG: .167 / .196 / .259
That's right. In 54 ALDS at bats, Scott Brosius recorded two extra-base hits. Two.
GET HIM IN MY OCTOBER FOXHOLE.
Still more, this time from Tim Keown:
The only thing harder to figure than Joe West's strike zone in the deciding game of the AL Division Series between the Yankees and Angels on Monday night was Alex Rodriguez. The curious case of the world's most talented head case continued through another shortened postseason for the Yankees. While 22-year-old Ervin Santana was creating a little slice of legend by burying 94-mph fastballs under the hands of some of baseball's best hitters, A-Rod was carving out a chapter of zero-RBI underachievement.
(FJM) Oh boy. Okay, so you're coming out firing. A-Rod is "the world's most talented head case"? Your first reason: he had zero RBI. You classify this as an "underachievement." Perhaps. Let's take a look at the achievements of one Mr. Reginald Martinez Jackson, a man many consider to be the greatest postseason performer of all time.
1973 ALCS, 5 games: 0 RBI
1974 ALCS, 4 games: 1 RBI
1974 WS, 5 games: 1 RBI
1977 ALCS, 5 games: 1 RBI
1980 ALCS, 3 games: 0 RBI
Am I cherry-picking Reggie's worst RBI playoff series? Yes, that is exactly what I'm doing. But Tim Keown is cherry-picking the worst playoff series in A-Rod's career to nail him to the cross. In his last three series, Rodriguez has totaled 5, 3, and 5 RBI. That underachiever.
In case you missed them, here are the numbers:
Career Numbers - Regular Season:
A-Rod - OBP/SLG .385, .577
Derek Jeter - OBP/SLG .386, .461
Career Numbers - Playoffs:
A-Rod - OBP/SLG, 1995-2004 (103 AB): .395 / .583
Derek Jeter (Anti A-Rod) - OBP/SLG, 1996-2004 (441 AB): .380 / .456
Despite what the New York press and Derek Jeter fans want to sell you, Alex Rodriguez is the better overall hitter, and yes, even in the playoffs. Yet how many fans would choose Jeter over A-Rod to make a plate appearance with the game on the line simply because of his `clutch' label?
The tale of Derek Jeter should be all you need to read regarding the New York situation. Make no mistake about it; Derek Jeter is an amazing hitter, shown in large part in that his playoff numbers rival his regular season ones. On the biggest stage, facing the best pitchers, Jeter still hits his numbers. But is this `clutch'? If anything, the idea of clutch reflects negatively on Jeter, in that, if he has the ability to step it up `when it counts' (which by the way, the numbers do not show--they show that Jeter is a good hitter, all the time, without any discrimination of who is on base or what inning it is), why doesn't he hit like that all the time?
From the comments after the same article:
The notion of the clutch player, especially in Jeter's case, is downright insulting. Why? Because with Jeter's OPS, if you're saying his hits all come close and late, then he's basically dogging it the rest of the way. I don't buy it. People are known to have faulty memories. I'd say that's more likely than Jeter only bothering to show up and play in the 8th and 9th innings against the Red Sox and Mets.
While clutch hitting may not exist, I can see the argument on the other side; 'un-clutch' hitting, of sorts. Players are human, and despite playing on a big stage all the time, I certainly believe the idea that there are times when a player can have a terrible at-bat in a big situation has some credence. Of course, any player at any time can have a `bad' series, and unfortunately, in the sports world, failures are minimized for those labeled `clutch' (when was the last time a Derek Jeter strikeout or error was broadcast on ESPN?), and maximized when the player is seen as a choker (see: all footage on A-rod).
Let’s try another player. Albert Pujols is a .330 career hitter with power. During about a third of his ABs, he's going to get a hit, and a certain percentage of those hits are going to be a homeruns. Pujols once hit a playoff game winning homerun against one of the best closers in baseball, Brad Lidge. Lidge hung a pitch and Pujols didn't miss it. But there is no statistical difference between him getting that hit in the 9th and him getting that hit in the 1st. Pujols was 0-4 leading up to that AB. Did he dog it in every other at-bat, but somehow knew how to hit when it was important? Again, that’s insulting.
No one in the history of the sport of baseball has ever mastered the art of getting a base hit more than an average of forty percent of their at-bats. It's irresponsible to claim that some hitters hit below their career numbers when there's nothing at stake, yet somehow hit over their career numbers when it "matters", and it all evens out that way. If that is truly the case, and it is something that players control, then why do they make outs at all? Claiming that `clutch hitting' is a quantifiable stat is the equivalent of saying that a baseball player can choose when his outs happen and when his hits happen. There is a certain element of randomness there; there just is. Baseball is not all skill.
Albert Pujols is one of the best hitters in baseball and has tremendous power. One of his homeruns happened to come at the most awesome, dramatic, awe-inspiring moment of the playoffs for the Cardinals. That's what makes baseball so amazing; ANYTHING can happen, and when it does, it leaves a mark. If Pujols grounds out instead, it's just another 4-2 playoff loss that no one remembers when discussing `clutch' players, unless he plays in New York, in which case, he's a choker.
When an established .280 hitter has a .250 season, we need not give up on him, as some teams would. Nor, when he has a .310 season, need we believe he has suddenly discovered the secret of life, and will hit over .300 for the rest of his career. To believe such things is to be in a class with the superstitious dice shooter who believes that the dice themselves are `hot' or `cold' for him.
And yet another; Adrian Beltre. He is a career .270 hitter who hit well above his career norms in 2004. Who couldn't logically predict what his numbers would look like overall? (Psssst...the answer is: Seattle) You don't magically figure out how to hit during your seventh year in the league and then forget everything you learned in your eighth. Law of averages says that Beltre will hit .270, no matter how he gets there.
I believe that a player can have a good at bat, giving himself every opportunity to succeed, which is important, but a hit is a hit is a hit. And even with the best intentions, the best pitch, the best situation, the best baseball heart in the world, he still will fail to get a hit during about seventy percent of his at-bats. But it's our faulty memories that will label a player as clutch or non-clutch based on what happened during the situation in question.
It's been suggested during the recent offensive struggles from 2006-2008 that the Oakland A’s don't have a very 'clutch' team. I respectfully disagree. It’s not that I think the A's hitters are 'clutch', it's that I don't think they have been good...period. In all situations, and that doesn't make them 'un-clutch', it makes them lousy hitters.
I don't really believe in clutch hitting. I think the idea was made up by a combination of the DJITBBPEE (Derek Jeter is the Best Baseball Player Ever EVER) club to justify his salary and 'intangibles', and players-turned-broadcasters/analysts who love any chance to remind the common fan that there is a mythical element to baseball that we can never understand; the idea that they alone can pick out a player of immeasurable worth, even though the actual numbers may tell a different story.
But like any absolute, if I'm going to draw a line at what I'm willing to believe, then it must be true in all circumstances, not just when it's convenient. Which leaves me with the case of David Ortiz.
Fire Joe Morgan puts it best:
KT: This kills me to write, but...there is no such thing as clutch hitting. The reason it kills me is because I have watched David Ortiz win thirteen games with walk-off hits in the last three years, including three in the playoffs, and two in the last two days. David Ortiz/clutch hitting is like one of those magic eyes holograms - you know there is no 3-D space shuttle in the book you are holding, but holy [crap] does it look like there is a 3-D space shuttle.Isn't that the truth? Maybe the solution is that Ortiz simply gets his pitch when it counts. Maybe opposing batteries just expect Ortiz to get the hit, and this is unconsciously reflected in their pitch selection. Maybe Ortiz is just a great hitter, and it follows naturally that a great hitter is going to win you some games. And if you look a little closer, you'll find that managers don't pitch him maybe the way they should, both in pitch selection, and choice of bullpen arms, seeing that the vast majority of this takes place against righties. To quote David Arnott, from the article above, David Ortiz against lefties is basically Brad Wilkerson.
But MAN!, he makes the 'clutchness' (used ironically) of Derek Jeter pale in comparison. And against a right-handed pitcher in a crucial at-bat, David Ortiz probably would high on my list of batters I'd want up there (A-rod and Pujols fight for the top spot). Yet I think I'd choose Ortiz simply because he's a really good hitter, not because of any mythical, magical `clutch' ability...I think.
So what is `clutch'? Do players really `rise' to the occasion when needed? Are some players just overall good players, and naturally they're also good in the big situations? Is it possible for a player to be average most of the time, but somehow turn it up when he needs a 'big hit'? Is David Ortiz a great hitter all the time or a clutch hitter when it counts? Or both? And more importantly, what data do you back it up with?
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