Study Reveals Baseball's Great Clutch Hitters

[DanGarion]

As seen here...

hxxp://www.livescience.com/othernews/050505_clutch_hitters.html

Study Reveals Baseball's Great Clutch Hitters By LiveScience Staff posted: 05 May 2005 05:01 pm ET A baseball fan and statistics buff has proven that clutch hitters really do exist, putting statistics behind the obvious. The new study, by math and economics student Elan Fuld of the University of Pennsylvania, was announced by the university Thursday. Fuld defined a clutch hitter as one who hits better at more important moments. He studied stats on 1,075 Major League players in the 1974-1992 seasons. Factors determining a clutch hit: how many bases were occupied, the score at the time, the inning, and how many outs. He also counted sacrifice flies, in which a runner scores but no hit is recorded. "What I found was that, when I included sacrifice flys in the analysis, there was overwhelming evidence that there were clutch hitters," Fuld said. So who were the greatest under pressure? Frank Duffy, Eddie Murray and Luis Gomez stood out. Bill Buckner, known as a choke artist for his Game 6 World Series error in 1986 that many remember as costing Boston the championship, was statistically proven to be a clutch hitter, too. Fans and players have always known there's a lot of psychology to hitting. "Once situational importance rose to around at least a certain level," Fuld explained, "the player would start to think this is very important and start doing something that makes him hit better, if he's clutch, or panics and does something that makes him hit worse, if he's a choke hitter."

Interesting since a lot of people claim there is no such thing as clutch. Of course reading this article it sounds to me like it's all subjective anyway. This is acutlaly a pretty crappy article.

[Subby]

Of course clutch exists! Markus put it into OOTP, didn't he? :)

[Ramzavail]

Leo Gomez? Is that a joke?

[Ksyrup]

I hear Dick Tracewski was a helluva clutch hitter as well.

[bryce]

Per Moneyball and Billy Beane, 'clutch hitting' is almost all luck...

[scooper]

I hit the clutch so hard and often that my wife won't let me buy 5-speed cars anymore. We can't afford the maintenance.

[Passacaglia]

Of course clutch exists! Markus put it into OOTP, didn't he? :)

If it's in the game, it's in the game.

[dixieflatline]

Interesting since a lot of people claim there is no such thing as clutch. Of course reading this article it sounds to me like it's all subjective anyway. This is acutlaly a pretty crappy article.

I don't think there is any doubt in anyone's mind that certain players have performed well in the clutch. The real issue though is if a player is clutch in year 1 will he be clutch again in year 2? I'm convinced that the answer to that question is no. If you go back in the record books you will find outliers who were clutch their entire career and players who were anti-clutch their entire career. That appears to be what the author did in this article. That doesn't mean that clutch hitting exists it just means that there is a spread to the data. If he would run a correlation with his data he would find exactly what others have found which is being clutch this year has no bearing on if you will be clutch next year.

[KevinNU7]

If a clutch hitter does exist then please answer me why that person does not hit well when there is no one on base and it is the first inning? Is he lazy?

[Maple Leafs]

Leo Gomez? Sounds to me like this study proves the existence of clutch hitting while at the same time proving that the concept is essentially useless.

[Mr. Wednesday]

Incorporating sac flies seems to me like it would haul a whole bunch of additional variables into things. I'm not convinced that "clutch" is what comes out of it. More likely, skilled hitters who are able to vary their approach to get the results they want in specific situations that call for it.

[Mr. Wednesday]

Dola, as opposed to hitters who perform at a higher level in specific situations.

[KevinNU7]

Mr.W I agree completely.

[CentralMassHokie]

I think that sabermetric folks sometimes over state their case on this one. The real argument statheads (like me) want to make is something along the lines of:

"Yes, there are absolutely players whose psychological makeup helps or hinders their performance in high pressure situations. However, a majority of those players get weeded out along the way to the majors, such that when you get to the majors the psychological edge is probably far less than it is at the high school or college level. Further, due to the large amount of luck involved in safely hitting a baseball, the edge a clutch hitter gives you over a non clutch hitter is probably negligible in the long run. Thus, it is a waste of resources to try and identify clutch players since the payoff is probably so minimal."

Do clutch players exist? Sure. Do they have any real effect on the outcome of a team's season? Probably not.

[QuikSand]

So far, all that seems to be available is the press release. I remain very unconvinced.

Just because some players had better or worse stats in clutch situations doesn't, by itself, demonstrate that there's anything happening to cause this, other than random outcomes over sample sizes small enough to yield disparate results. I hope the study goes further than that... otherwise this adds essentially nothing to the so-called debate.

[ThunderingHERD]

I just got done bashing this "study" elsewhere, so I'll just say: yeh, it's a bunch of bullshit.

edit: also, I'm sure many of you have seen this before, but here it is anyway: <a href="http://www.baseball1.com/bb-data/grabiner/fullclutch.html" target="new">Clutch hitting study</a>

[sterlingice]

Incorporating sac flies seems to me like it would haul a whole bunch of additional variables into things. I'm not convinced that "clutch" is what comes out of it. More likely, skilled hitters who are able to vary their approach to get the results they want in specific situations that call for it.
That and getting a ground ball to the other side to move a runner over, etc.

While it's tough statistically to map all this out, I still don't completely believe the claims of "there's no such thing as clutch".

As to the question of "why is someone not as good when there's no one on and in the first inning"- yeah, some hitters give away at bats. Or not even that, but no one doubted that Michael Jordan took it to that "next level" in the playoffs, etc. There's just that extra level of being able to play that some players have.

SI

[Senator]

Pete Incaviglia finally gets the recognition he deserves. But he is no Leo Gomez.

[sterlingice]

Pete Incaviglia finally gets the recognition he deserves. But he is no Leo Gomez.
Pete Incaviglia has always been a favorite of the TTO crowd :)

SI

[ThunderingHERD]

As to the question of "why is someone not as good when there's no one on and in the first inning"- yeah, some hitters give away at bats. Or not even that, but no one doubted that Michael Jordan took it to that "next level" in the playoffs, etc. There's just that extra level of being able to play that some players have.
SI

Um, I doubted. Check out these statistics that took me WAY too long to compile:

Jordan Playoff v. Regular season (every year he played mroe than 10 playoff games):

<pre>
<b>YR PT FG RB AST STL</b>
98p 32 46% 5.1 3.5 1.5
98 29 46% 5.8 3.5 1.7
97p 31 46% 7.9 4.8 1.6
97 30 48% 5.9 4.3 1.7
96p 31 46% 4.9 4.1 1.8
96 30 50% 6.6 4.3 2.2
93p 35 48% 6.7 6.0 2.1
93 33 49% 6.7 5.5 2.8
92p 35 50% 6.2 5.8 2.0
92 30 52% 6.4 6.1 2.3
91p 31 52% 6.4 8.4 2.4
91 32 54% 6.0 5.5 2.7
90p 37 51% 7.2 6.8 2.8
90 34 53% 6.9 6.3 2.8
89p 35 51% 7.0 7.6 2.5
89 33 52% 8.0 8.0 2.9
</pre>

As you can see, the statistics demonstrate no ability to consistently overachieve in any statistical category, other than a slight bump in points which can be attributed to the fact that he simply took more shots. Also note that his FG% fell in the playoffs every year but his last.

[Huckleberry]

Oh snap.

[kcchief19]

I think this whole debate fits into the category of "you can use statistics to prove anything." Depending on what variables you decide to include or remove, it's very difficult to prove any conclusion you want to draw.

Case in point, the Jordan example above. His individual statistics may not show an improvement over his regular season stats, but if you look at the statistics in another way that may show something else entirely. For instance, without looking at the stats, my guess is that Jordan's percentage of his teams points, assists, rebounds and steals probably increased in the playoffs because his team probably averaged fewer points and his performance is probably statistically more impressive when you factor in the level of competition, since he played teams who were much better in the playoffs. 33 points per game in the regular season is not as good as 33 points in the playoffs.

I'm skeptical of the initial claims of the study, but I'm skeptical of many other baseball statistical studies as well. I'm still not convinced of the whole DIPS theory and Ira McCracken's numbers -- they certainly may make sense on paper, but that doesn't mean that they consistently work in practice.

[clintl]

Frank Duffy????

That said, I do believe that how a player reacts psychologically to pressure can have effect on performance.

[Mr. Wednesday]

That's Voros McCracken, and it's been shown that DIPS is not 100% accurate (but, IIRC, that the non-pitcher effects are much greater than the pitcher's ability to influence BABIP).