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The "let's put this to bed" Clutch blog

Posted 04-11-2012 at 03:31 AM by bravos4evr

Okey Dokey, we have gone round and round on this here forum about the concept of clutch and I think that most of our differences stem from a misunderstanding of what we each are talking about.
When I mention clutch I am referring to the notion that there are individual players who are clutch and have the reputation as such (Jeter, Big Papi, Pujols...etc). My position is that not only are the usual suspects on this list generally the best hitters in baseball, but that their performance in close/late situations and hitting with RISP over their careers falls within the margin of error of their normal situational numbers. (which I will demonstrat in a bit )

I think other's are confusing this statement to mean that there is no such thing as a clutch situation (when there clearly are). However, how do we define clutch? Is it just hitting with RISP in any inning? Is it only when the game is on the line in late/close situations? Is it the entire playoffs or only those same situations in the playoffs?

For the purpose of this blog I am going to use 2 out RISP, late/close OPS and playoff performance to dictate clutch.

I could use fangraphs High leverage but I can't find out how they decide what is high leverage or not, so I don't want to report info I don't understand

I am going to pick 5 players who we define as "clutch" and 5 random players off the top of my head.(and I will use players with at least 5 years of service time so we have a decent sample size)

Clutch 5:

Jeter
Papi
Chipper
Matsui
Pujols

Random 5:

Damon
Renteria
Texiera
Soriano
Vlad Guerrero

First the Clutch 5

all numbers career)

Jeter-

OPS- .832

playoff OPS- .839

2 out RISP OPS-.840

Late/Close OPS-.796

Big Papi-

OPS-.923

playoff OPS-.908

2 out RISP OPS-.949

late/close OPS-.900

Chipper-

OPS- .935

playoffs-.871

2 out RISP-.907

late/close-.913

Matsui-

OPS-.830

playoffs-.933

2out RISP-.761

late/close-.912

Pujols-

OPS-.1.037

playoffs-1.046

2 out RISP-1.133

late/close-1.023

aside from the odd swings for Matsui everyone stays pretty much within the range of their career numbers when in late close and in two out RISP situations and the Playoffs, let us now compare to the other fine players who don't carry the "clutch" reputation shall we?

Damon-

OPS-.789

playoffs-.775

2 out RISP-.713

late/close-.780

Renteria-

OPS-.741

playoffs- .666

2 out RISP-.690

late/close-.670

Texiera-

OPS-.903

playoffs-.637

2 out RISP- 1.039

late/close-.862

Soriano

OPS-.828

playoffs-.562

2 out RISP-.773

late/close-.788

Vlad-

OPS-.931

playoffs-.664

2 out RISP-.941

LATE/CLOSE-.920

Well that was interesting, these guys (and Matsui above) prove how volatile playoff performance is. but the other numbers hold very well with their normal career stats.

Clutch situations happen, every player faces them , I reckon you can take just about any player and compare their RISP numbers and late/close with their career numbers and you will find they are pretty close to being the same. with some normal deviation here and there.

The playoffs, however, are a crap shoot, great hitters have lousy series (and in such a limited sample size one or two lousy series can skew the numbers greatly ).

The argument has never been does CLUTCH exist, but rather are there players who perform better in those I would say yes!!! But they are the same players who always perform better than everyone else! The great hitters!!!

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Clutch does exists. It's not that certain people perform "better under pressure", that's not really possible. What does exist is that certain people take pressure better than others. When Big Papi comes to the plate, he's going to have an advantage over a young pitcher facing him in a tight situation. When you try to show that "there's no difference" between their career OPS and their playoff OPS, you have to understand that when you're hitting in the playoffs, you're facing better quality pitching. If everything was statistically the same as we are led to believe, the OPS of the big hitters would be 100 to 200 points lower than their career average due to better quality pitching.

Posted 04-11-2012 at 03:41 PM by Garydee Garydee is offline

	But you don't always face better quality pitching. One could hardly say the Rangers had superstar pitching, nor the Yankees recently(or the Red Sox ).
	Posted 04-11-2012 at 04:05 PM by bravos4evr

Huh? The Rangers and Yankees have good staffs. Both were in the top 5 last year. I'll admit they didn't perform well in the playoffs. That's pretty much an anomaly though. Pitching usually dominates the playoffs. The Giants won the World Series the year before with great pitching. However, if we had an experiment of me taking 8 Big Papis in the lineup with Curt Schilling as my pitcher vs. you with 8 A-Rods and Gregg Maddux as your pitcher, who would win in a World Series? Your team on paper is better than mine, but I'm willing to bet I'd wax you.

Posted 04-11-2012 at 04:43 PM by Garydee Garydee is offline

For the most part, I feel the concept of "clutch" is just a matter of opinion.

While it appears that one can statistically prove a player is clutch...there's also the argument that the "clutch" guys are just good to begin with, as you state Bravos.

For me, simply put, "clutch" is a matter of a player's mental ability. The mind is such a powerful weapon....and the folks that can persevere through "pressure" mentally are the most likely to succeed.

There is no "clutch" without being mentally strong. A guy that comes to mind (without looking up stats) is David Eckstein. No one will ever consider him to be great....or even clutch, but I do remember him coming through in so many "clutch" situations....yet, his day-to-day performance never dictated that he'd be the "hero" of any given high leverage situation. I'd be interested to see the stats for him.

However, Eckstein falls into that category of "mentally strong". He was always a guy that was able to not only maximize his minimal physical tools...but to seemingly play well over his head because of how mentally strong he was.

In other words, it comes down to the concept of psyching yourself up....but not psyching yourself out. Some guys can raise their game and focus when the game becomes a game of mental attrition and some guys can't. It just so happens a lot of the guys who can do that are good to begin with....but I'm sure in the history of the game there have been others (average players) who seemingly are "clutch" and never fail in a do or die situation.

Posted 04-12-2012 at 04:10 AM by BFH BFH is offline