Projo Sports Blog

By Sam Mellinger
The Kansas City Star

Somebody's about to be anointed a hero, and that'll happen even if it's just luck. It'll happen whether it's deserved or not,and whether the evidence says there is such thing as a clutch hitter or not.

As baseball's postseason begins, a group of 200 players will compete for their reputations. Aaron Boone's is secure. So is Bobby Thomson's. Same with Joe Carter, Bucky Dent, Kirk Gibson, and a host of others whose career-defining moment came with a clutch home run in the playoffs.

Nobody's benefited more from the idea of being clutch than David Ortiz.

"He's bulletproof, as far as I'm concerned," former Yankees manager Joe Torre says.

"He's like a superhero," teammate Josh Beckett says.

"I just swing hard in case I hit it," Ortiz says. "That's it."

Ortiz is the face of a phenomenon that exists in every sport, but perhaps manifests itself most obviously in baseball. In basketball, you know the team's best player will take the last possession. In football, you know it's on the quarterback.

In baseball, it's whoever happens to come up in the batting order. Everyone has an equal shot at coming through in the clutch.

And a growing pile of evidence says there is no such thing as "a clutch hitter."

Would it surprise you to know that of the seven postseasons George Brett was a part of, he hit for a lower average in four of them than he did in the regular season?

Would it surprise you to know that Derek Jeter's career postseason batting average is lower than his regular-season average?

The statistical community has long held firm that clutch hitting does not exist, and any deviation from a player's "normal" stats is simply due to luck-good or bad. More recent research has discovered that clutch hitting may exist-but barely.

The definitive work on this subject was done by Nate Silver of Baseball Prospectus , and presented in a book titled, "Baseball Between the Numbers: Why Everything You Know About the Game is Wrong."

Silver used much more data than previous studies and determined clutch vs. not-clutch situations by the likelihood that the outcome of a given situation would determine the winner-not necessarily the traditional, late-innings-of-a-close-game method. He concludes that clutch hitting accounts for two percent of the impact of offense on wins.
Yeah. Two percent.

"(Clutch hitting) is not a complete myth, but there's a lot more noise than signal," Silver says. "At the margins, would you rather give a little credit to a guy like David Ortiz in a clutch situation? Probably yes. If you really crunch the numbers, you can find a grain of it, but it really is like the proverbial needle in the haystack."

Bill James is among the statisticians who agree with Silver-we may never be able to prove that a clutch hitting effect does not exist, but the numbers say it's very small.

One reason for this is that the journey to the big leagues, by its cut-throat nature, tends to eliminate guys who can't handle pressure. In Moneyball , for instance, A's general manager Billy Beane talks about how his own pro career was derailed because he
constantly felt overwhelmed by situations.

There is pressure in batting with the bases loaded and two outs when you're down one run and in the big leagues. But hit or strike out, you're cashing a big check and making your next flight on a charter.

Is that pressure worse than batting in the minor leagues in front of a few hundred people but knowing that your career is on the line?

David Grabiner is a mathematician who's written several articles on baseball. He presented a study on clutch hitting to the Society for American Baseball Research that found many of the same things as Silver, where the idea of clutch hitting is vastly overrated by media and fans.

Aside from random selection and small sample sizes, Grabiner says most inconsistencies in a player's production in clutch situations can be attributed to how the player is used. Star hitters are more likely to face specialized relievers and receive intentional walks, for instance.

Lesser players receive lighter attention from the opposing team and are pinch hit for when they have a platoon disadvantage.

"While I do believe that there is a small ability (to hit in the clutch)," Grabiner says, "I do not believe that much of the ability is due to the player's reaction to the clutch situation."
Another possible explanation lies in one difference between baseball and other sports.

Orlando's Nick Anderson famously missed four consecutive free throws in the final minute of an NBA Finals game and became one of the first pro athletes to hire a sports psychologist.

A baseball hitter doesn't have that long to psyche himself out. He's got less than a half-second to decide whether to swing, so once he's in the batter's box, it's more muscle memory than nerves.

But, you know, that's not what our minds remember. The images of Carter's homer or Jeter's relay throw are etched forever. Just like a batter's hot streak-by the way, studies show that slumps and tears are due more to random selection than anything else, too.
"Our minds can be toyed with," Silver says. "We're pretty good at perceiving things, but you always remember certain big hits. Even though the evidence is pretty strong that it's nowhere near where it's made out to be."

There is disagreement in traditional baseball circles, of course. Red Sox owner John Henry once gave Ortiz a plaque inscribed, "DAVID ORTIZ, 34, THE GREATEST CLUTCH HITTER IN THE HISTORY OF THE BOSTON RED SOX."

Denny Matthews once said of George Brett, "He was the clutch guy. Not only with the manager, coaches and his teammates, but the fans knew more often than not in a clutch situation, he'd come through because he was so mentally tough and he accepted being that guy."

Rick Sutcliffe once hit a home run and threw seven scoreless innings in a 1984 playoff game for the Cubs, then watched five years later as Will Clark nearly single-handedly beat his club in the NLCS.

"Some guys, how do I put this, really thrive on that big stage," Sutcliffe says. "There are other guys who aren't real comfortable with it. What I've loved about the postseason over the years, these guys who really aren't even noticed during the regular season, all of a sudden become household names because of what they do in October."

Others are less sure about the ability to hit in the clutch. The Twins, for instance, are batting .308 with runners in scoring position this season and .264 in all other situations. The familiar refrain you hear goes something like this: if it were that easy, they'd be hitting .308 all the time .

So clutch hitting is either mostly the product of luck and worth two percent of an offense's impact, or it's worth plaques and monuments and bulletproof reputations.

And maybe the disagreement is just as well. For the next four weeks, it won't matter who's right.

 Tags  Boston Red Sox David Ortiz MLB playoffs

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