Well sure - but I’d rather him try to drive the ball in that event. More chance for an XBH. Plus, “man on third” is rare compared to every other bases-occupied scenario other than bases loaded. And in every other scenario I’d still rather have Ichiro trying to drive the ball out of the infield.
OK, I like Ichiro just fine, and there is no doubt he’s a hell of a ballplayer, but he is not even close to the “modern Rickey Henderson” in his effect on the game. Ichiro’s highest-steal year was 56 in 2001 (and his second highest is only 45). Rickey had 12 seasons with more than that. Ichiro’s MLB career line is .331/.377/.430. Rickey’s was .279 /.401 /.419 (and that’s with a number of pretty lousy years at the end included - an average season in his prime was more like .300/.420/.470). Henderson was inner-ring once-in-a-lifetime talent.
As far as the OP, my list would definitely have more pitchers, and would pretty much be just a top-10 MVP list. There is really no way that Pedroia would be on it, and probably not Youk either. I’m not a big believer in “rising to the occasion” or “proving yourself in the postseason”.
Oh, and on that hypothetical Team Pujols v. Team Santana, I’m pretty sure I would take Team Pujols (especially in a series - Santana can only start one or two games, Pujols mashes every day).
And therein lies the problem with the way that “clutch” and "game breaking gets evaluated: it’s so subjective as to be virtually useless.
Your memory is, like everyone else’s, a faulty mechanism. Also, you simply don’t have the ability to watch and to recall every play that is made over 2,500 Major League Baseball games every year. You might remember some of David Ortiz’s game-breaking hits, but it doesn’t mean he was the only one that was doing them. I’m not saying that clutch or game-breaking hitting doesn’t exist; i’m simply saying that it’s nowhere near as important as simply being a good hitter.
A few years ago, the guys at Baseball Prospectus wrote an article about this topic. It was titled, appropriately enough, “Is David Ortiz a Clutch Hitter?” They basically defined clutch hitting as getting hits in high-leverage situations, when the game is both close and late. So, a home run in the top of the 9th when your team is down by 7 runs is not a clutch hit; but a home run in the top of the ninth when your team is down by 1 run, is a clutch hit. Stuff like that.
Running the numbers, they found that Ortiz had an incredibly clutch 2005; in fact, it was the fifth-clutchest season in the last 35 years.They also found his 2000 season to be pretty good. But basically, for the rest of his career, he hit pretty much as well in clutch situations as he did in non-clutch situations. The thi9ng is, when someone is a good hitter like Ortiz, that means he’s hitting well all the time, but people are much more likely to remember the clutch hits, because they come at a time in the game where people are closely focused on every single play.
The BP author concluded his article by noting:
I mean, look at a guy like Albert Pujols. You might check out his postseason batting line, which reads .323/.429/.593, and say “Wow, he can really produce when the pressure is on.”
Then you check out his career numbers for the regular season, and see his overall career line is .334/.425/.624. Despite his awesome postseason numbers, they’re actually not as good as his regular season numbers. The guy is just a monster. He has never, in his whole career, had a season OPS+ of less than 150. He has been in the top 5 in the MVP in 7 of his 8 seasons, winning twice, and coming 2nd three times. His worst placing in MVP voting was 9th, in 2007, when his OPS+ of 157 was a full 39 percentage points higher than that of Jimmy Rollins, who won the award.
I’ll take that sort of incredible ability any day, over some nebulous quality like “game-breaking” or “inspirational” or “clutch” or “scrappy.” And the whole “October performance” stuff is ridiculous. Pretty soon we’ll be hearing how David Eckstein should be on the list because of his grit, and the fact that he has a World Series ring.
While intangibles are not completely useless, in the vast majority of cases any list of game-breaking players should, as Jimmy Chitwood suggested, be pretty much the same as a list of players with great tangibles.
Look at someone like A-Rod, who constantly gets poked at for allegedly being bad in the clutch. His postseason line, while not as good as his regular season stats, is a respectable .279/.361/.483. When he makes it to the Championship Series he’s even better, going .315/.413/.611 in ALCS appearances.
But even more importantly, his presence on the team is, in many cases, the only reason that the team gets to play in October at all. Rodriguez has spent 5 seasons with the Yankees, during which time they have made the playoffs on 4 occasions. In two of those years, A-Rod’s performance was literally the difference between them playing baseball and playing golf in October. In 2005, there’s absolutely no way in the world they make the playoffs without him; in 2007 they probably wouldn’t have either. There’s a damn good chance the Mariners don’t make it without him in 2000 also. I’ll have him on my “game-breakers” team every day, thanks.
True that. Short of a freakish 4 HR game or something, position players require an enormous amount of luck to dominate a game – luck as in men on base when they hit, the ball getting hit to them, their pitcher keeping them in the game, etc.
Moreover, the OP seems to want us to pretend to be mind readers, where we claim to know that the reason Youkilis went deep was because “his game was raised” by the inspiring, spunky Pedroia (who emotions we also can interpret from watching him on TV).
Pshaw. Eckstein is just a poor man’s Mark Lemke.
That statement is quickly becoming the most overused phrase by Phillie haters in recent baseball history.
I’m not factoring in what he said before the season; the fact is, he was in the middle of just about everything for the Phillies during the stretch run that year.
Then you should bitch and moan about it when someone who doesn’t friggin’ loving watching the Phillies says it. The fact is, Rollins was the third best hitter on that team, and the third best SS not just in the NL, but in the NL East.
You won’t find a bigger Phillies fan than myself on this board. That was a joke of an MVP award.
Bollocks.
He finished fifth in the NL in runs created. Only one of the guys ahead of him made the playoffs (Holliday), and only one was as valuable defensively (Ramirez).
I’m not saying he definitely deserved it, but it was a defensible choice.
Missed the window. After looking at the defensive stats, I’ll amend that: None of the top NL hitters contributed as much defensively as Rollins.
Good post, can’t argue with anything you said, but in my defense, my memory in this particular instance was correct:
Rollins was certainly more deserving than Howard was in his MVP season.
Amazing how some guys are consistently just “luckier” than others, though, ain’t it? That’s what I was after - who do you most look for when the game is on the line?
Re Rollins specifically, was he and is he a guy that gives a Phils fan extra confidence in a Phils win when he comes to bat in that situation? Or when a ball is hit his way? It’s hard to tell in his case because there are several other guys on the team who are so “lucky” too, but would they do just as well with, say, Eckstein at SS?
No, just fans. Of the game, that is, not of “defensive stats” or “runs created” similar distorted/filtered folderol that averages out into meaninglessness the very moments that are the topic of the thread.
Or just a fan of sports; the same concepts apply in any of them.
That is the thing though. No one is consistently comes through in the clutch. At least not to any great extent. Besides if I had a player who was consistently better in big situations, I’d wonder why he wasn’t giving his all the rest of the time.
Give fans extra confidence. That is an MVP criteria now? The Phillies would have have significantly worse with Eckstein, because he is a far less talented player. They would have just as good with Reyes or Hanley Ramirez.
Being a fan is irrational. You are being irrational about something irrational. It is kind of impressive in a way. Mostly just sad though. Every fan of baseball likes it for different reasons. There isn’t a true way to follow the game. Personally, I value information. You value unprovable theories. That doesn’t make you any less of a fan, just makes you wrong a lot.
The topic is game-breaking players. MVP criteria can be whatever the hell the voter wants them to be.
Maybe those guys can rise to actual pressure, and maybe they can’t. Reyes hasn’t, Ramirez hasn’t had the chance on that team. You can’t make that statement so flatly.
Fair enough, but isn’t there something more to your enjoyment of the game than what you can pull off a computer and stick into a spreadsheet the next day? I hope so; it would be “sad” (your word) if there weren’t.
The “waaah, I’m a real fan and you’re not” blather and the inexplicable argument over Jimmy Rollins’s MVP Award aside, there’s one answer to the question in the OP:
Albert Pujols.
Year after year, Pujols mashes it. He hits for average. He hits for power. He hits in the regular season. He hits in the playoffs. *He even rips it in the All-Star Game. * He never has an off year. He never appears pressured. He may not be human. You can pick any nine guys to fill out your list but today, #1 is Albert Pujols and nobody else is nearly as dependable. If you want a guy at bat in a clutch situation you want the guy who is always at the top of a hitter’s game, and that man is Albert Pujols. You can pick nine more guys to fill out the list but that changes from year to year. Maybe next year someone will hit 46 homers who hadn’t before, who knows? But Pujols will be awesome, as he always is. If they arranged a total redraft and made me owner of a baseball team, I’d give up my second round pick just to guarantee I could get Albert Pujols with my first.
Can he hit in the clutch? Remember that home run off Brad Lidge in the NLCS? Oh, my God. It was hit in Houston and landed in Johannesburg. Pujols has played a third of a season in the playoffs and he’s just as good as he is in June. And remember, that’s against better than normal pitching; you’re not hitting against the crappy teams with a lot of lousy pitchers. Pujols does not care. 13 postseason homers in 53 games.
You know that guy who had the season where he hit .334 and hit 40 homers, and hit 43 doubles, drove in 122 RBI, was the best player in the league? That’s Albert Pujols’s AVERAGE SEASON.
Pujols is so ridiculous I don’t think he’s fully appreciated, because he doesn’t have a peak, it’s just non-stop awesome. He’s won the MVP Award twice, and if you were to just look at his year-by-year numbers, you can’t tell which two seasons are the MVP seasons because he’s that awesome every year.
There is nobody better to have at the plate when you need a hit. Ask Brad Lidge.
This is, of course, absolutely right. As someone who attends 25 Cardinals games a year and watches pretty much all the rest on TV it’s nearly impossible to overstate his impact on both his team and the opposing one. His defense is impeccable as well.
I think the bigger point being made is that the answer to “top game-breaking baseball player” is basically identical to “top baseball player”. The consistency that you rightly praise in this post is pretty much the entire purpose of baseball - as Earl Weaver said “This isn’t football son, we do this every day”. Anybody can get lucky and dominate one game (I once watched Mark Whiten hit 4 HRs in a game, and have also seen Jose Jiminez pitch a no-hitter against Randy Johnson). The great ones do it every day, every at-bat, “clutch situation” or not.
No one alwayscomes through in the clutch, but certainly some are better at it than others.
I think the hardest thing to define about being clutch is exactly what a clutch situation is. But even though that is a grey area to quantify, a player knows, when he is performing, whether or not a moment is a clutch. And that the more that rides on that moment, and the more his teammates and fans are counting on him to succeed at that moment, the more clutch that moment it is. And even the best of athletes are human, and many of them are affected by that realization, for better or for worse. Clutch performers are the players who in the most nerve inducing moments are able to be their most confident, focused and relaxed. Some players more than others are able to consistently perform better than their usual in these situations because they can focus that extra adrenaline to increase their skill level.
This has to be true in sports, because it’s true in life, some people choke more than they rise to the occasion in important situations, and vice versa
It sounds fine in theory, but I don’t think you reach the majors if you can’t handle the pressure. More to point, the numbers don’t back your theory, at least not much. If there was such a thing as a “clutch” player, than theoretically that player would consistently perform better each year in the clutch. However, this isn’t the case. Regardless of your definition of clutch, there is not consistency in performance from year to year.
Well, sure - the better hitters.
The guys you want in the clutch are the best guys. That’s why I want Pujols in there - because of all the baseball players in the world, he’s the one who can *always *be counted on to be an elite hitter. He’s the most consistently superior hitter since… jeez, Hank Aaron? Willie Mays?