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Clutch players (1 Viewer)

the moops

Footballguy
Got an email today from MLB. Asking me to vote for Clutch Performer of the Year. Berkman, Pujols, Morneau, K-Rod, Sabathia and Lee are the nominees.

2008 Late and Close OPS numbers for the batters

Berkman - 1.270 OPS

Pujols - 1.044 OPS

Morneau - .802 OPS

Sept/Oct numbers for pitchers

K-Rod - .90 ERA, .711 OPS against, 9 saves

Sabathia - 2.11 ERA, .578 OPS against, 2-2 WL

Lee - 3.08 ERA, .723 OPS against, 3-1 WL

It is certainly difficult to quantify "clutch". However, looking at numbers should at least give us an idea whether our perceptions are true (or somewhat true). Justin Morneau is touted as a very clutch player. There are a few folk in here who use this as reason for him to be atop the MVP list. Apparently MLB and/or writers agree. However, his numbers do not bear this out at all. In Sept/Oct this year he had an OPS of .696. That is bad.

How do you quantify clutch?

Of this list, I would choose Sabathia as being most clutch. I just randomly chose Sept/Oct stats for pitchers. Not sure if that is the best to choose. Maybe 2nd half would have been better. Either way, I think there is no arguing how "clutch" Sabathia was from the day he was traded to the NL.

 
I would quantify it with regards to a couple categories:

1) Hitting/Pitching in key Situations: ie: HItting with Runners in scoring positon... Game Winning RBI in late innings....etc. For pitchers.. how do they do with runners on base or in scoring position? Some guys clamp down... others fall apart.

2) Big Games: Stretch run hitting stats... pitching in key games (ie stopping slides, postseason games (any)...etc)

 
Baseball Prospectus tried to quantify clutch and wound up with pretty unsatisfying results. They figured (paraphrased) "a clutch player must be one that excels in situations where the game can be decided by their actions" and then simply analyzed how player performance changed their own team's probability of winning. The problem is, guys who hit 3 run homers in the top of the first have a seemingly huge effect on their team's winning the game, because teams rarely come back from such an early hole.

There is the idea of leverage, where later innings in close games count more, but again, I'm pretty sure the result was "really good players are clutch."

I do believe in clutch players, but think it's not a very strong positive effect, but rather the absence of a negative effect. In other words, I only really believe in clutch so far as ones ability to avoid cracking under pressure.

 

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