When i was writing in this thread yesterday about Pujols, i was thinking almost exactly the same thing. It seems to me that, for a guy who is the best hitter in all of baseball, you really don’t hear much hoopla about Pujols in the media.
It might have something to do with where he plays, i guess. You can be pretty sure that if he was playing in Boston or Chicago or New York, we’d have heard much more about him. As it is, if you don’t follow the Cardinals, it’s quite easy to go days or weeks at a time without hearing about him at all, even while he’s crushing the ball every single day.
I guess the media only have so much time to devote to St. Louis, and Rick Ankiel makes a more interesting story.
You can, because there’s different kinds of pressure. A guy with the talent to dominate at AAA doesn’t feel much pressure there because he knows he can just out-talent the opposition. Put him the majors, and that certainty, the absolute confidence that ISTM is part of clutchiness or gamebreaking, isn’t there anymore. A player can learn to perform under the kind of pressure he is seeing for the first time ever, when he doesn’t have absolute certainty or the ability to fake it. He can learn to shrug off the times when he gets beaten so it doesn’t affect him the next time. He can make the mental adjustments he needs as well as the physical ones, or he can find himself out of the majors shortly afterward.
There’s also a different kind of pressure on a winning team than on a sad-sack one – a player can have more confidence in himself on a bad team out of the knowledge that failure is tolerated and even expected. A guy with great talent can thrive on a team that thinks being a “spoiler” is a good thing, but can wilt in a pennant race in front of 45,000 screaming fans who want a title.
Bootis, nicely said. Thanks.
What “theory”? It can be a fleeting thing, not repeatable over an extended period. Lots of things can happen to take a guy off his peak, and it only takes a little.
Jas09, I don’t quite agree - the consistent teams win the most games overall, but necessarily the big ones. Were the Atlanta Braves the best team in the NL over the last 15 years (or whatever it was)? They were the most consistent, sure, and won the division pretty much every year. But what did they do in October, in the games that mattered the most? They did come through once, but that’s it - they were consistent only in complimenting the team that just beat them and wishing them good luck in the next series. That’s pretty much the opposite of what we’ve been discussing here.
I think I understand what you’re trying to say here. But if you define “clutchness” as simply “getting clutch hits” without it being any sort of consistent repeatable ability then I’m not sure you can answer the OP’s question. I can tell you who got the most clutch hits in any given season (see the Ortiz examples above) but if it’s not repeatable then I have no way of predicting who will have the most clutch hits in the upcoming season beyond just picking the best overall players. This is all the opponents of “clutch hitting” theory mean - you can’t use past clutchness (or chokiness) to predict future high-pressure results. It’s much more predictive to use overall skill levels.
An example: David Eckstein has more World Series rings over the past 3 years than Jose Reyes or Hanley Ramirez (and a WS MVP as well). But if my team has a crucial game and need a SS it would be extremely foolish to chose Eckstein for that task based on his past clutch performances.
Well, this gets into a different but related question of how you define the “best team” in any season (or multiple seasons). I would unequivocally say that the Braves were the best team in the NL in the 90s. To me baseball teams prove their greatness over the course of the regular season and a hot month in October (or getting carried by one or two hot pitchers) doesn’t change that. I will always believe, having seen them both up close, that the 2004 Cardinals were the best team in the majors and the 2006 Cardinals were perhaps not even in the top 10. But history will show that the 2006 team were World Champions while the 2004 team ran into a red-hot Red Sox team and got swept.
But he clearly impacted the game more when he wasn’t in his prime, then, didn’t he? I mean, a hundred and twenty intentional walks or whatever, plus his ridiculous numbers when they pitched to him?
Anyway, I’m going to make an effort to bridge the gap between the “real” fans and the “real” fans. There is a statistic called Win Probability Added. What it does is that it takes every at-bat a player has been in over the course of an entire season, in context, and evaluates how well the player came through in what you might fairly call game-breaking situations. It works like this: by running the numbers of every game that’s ever been played, we can determine that, in the bottom of the ninth inning, down by two runs, with one person on base, the probability that a team will win is, you know, 1.2% or whatever. And there’s a similar number for each situation.
Given this knowledge, we can take every at-bat an individual player has logged, look at what the win probabilities were, calculate what his impact on those win probabilities was, and amass a record that is, more or less, a statistical aggregate of the extent to which he broke games open (or did the opposite - subtracting win probability). This can be converted into an estimate of how many actual wins over average that player’s performance contributed in fact (as opposed to how many wins he theoretically would contribute on an average team, for instance).
So if Albert Pujols’ number comes up positive-five, that means that on the actual Cardinals, in the actual situations Pujols batted in, his contributions added an extra five wins over what you’d have expected. This is called Win Probability Added (WPA), and you can look at the leaderboard here. There’s even something called a “Clutch” score - and get this: Alex Rodriguez was dead last in it last year! Don’t you love statistics now?
Now, this supports a little bit of what just about everyone has been saying so far - on the one hand, there is such a thing as a “clutch” situation, and we can even measure them. On the other hand, the numbers don’t really suggest that certain players are very good players but not “clutch” players. They suggest that the players who play the best in general are the best in the clutch, and vice versa, and that one player might be really gamebreaking one year in certain situations, and slightly less so the next, and that the fluctuation is essentially random. It’s circumstantial, in other words, except to the extent that a really good player will do a lot of really good things, and less good players less so.
Anyway, it’s an interesting statistic, and I think it goes directly to the heart of what the thread’s about.
Lance Berkman? Andre Ethier? Nate McLouth? Yeah, that list is interesting.
I’d be even more interested in the postseason record, when the pressure is really on, than in the regular season one, though. Yes, there are ways to quantify clutch situations, as you point out - but none that are obviously the best or most accurate or most informative (which, I am told repeatedly, is what the study of game stats is all about).
The problem is the tendency to consider significant that which can be measured or number-crunched. Far too often, you just get noise. Noise that has a number and can be interpreted by those inclined to, but still noise. And that which cannot be quantified? The tendency to thereby discount its significance results in *distortion *of one’s understanding of the game, not depth.
I’m usually out of my depth in these threads, but your focus on October basically is begging for sample bias problems and for relying heavily on small samples while overlooking big ones. For example you mentioned CC Sabathia’s playoff record, where he hasn’t done much but has only had five starts, and brushed off what he did in Milwaukee, where he made 17 starts during a playoff race last year and did carry the team. How was the pressure not really on him then?
They have postseason WPA for individual players if you care to look them up. What you’ll find is that they fluctuate positive to negative from year to year for most players. David Ortiz’ postseason WPA has been negligible in every year other than '04, when it was very good, but it was negative in '02, '05, and '08, for instance. I’ll also point out that above you made the argument that the big leagues represent a different kind of pressure than the minor leagues, so it must be the case that over the course of an entire season, a player is in enough high-leverage situations that if he’s ‘clutch’ that will shine through, no? I suppose it’s possible that a player can be a regular-season hero type, but wilt under the glare of the postseason lights.
Anyway, like Marley said, the narrower you make your definition, the more trouble you’ll have being able to have a consistent and supportable argument.
Well, I’m prepared to argue that it isn’t the mom’s basement, spreadsheet-diving stathead nerd who wouldn’t know a bleacher seat if he woke up in one who does the misinterpreting of the statistics. For instance, I don’t think somebody who is really invested in a statistical approach would ever point to a list of WPA leaders as representative of true clutchness. Frankly, it’s the old school fan, who doesn’t want his enjoyment of the game tarnished by geeks and numbers who is more likely to distort what a statistic means, because he or she probably just doesn’t want to hear about it. It’s not the nerds who think numbers are supplanting the experience; it’s the nerd-haters who suspect it and resent it.
To keep this from becoming another argument along the same old lines, I’ll use myself (a stat weirdo) as an example. You know why I think Albert Pujols is head and shoulders above everyone else? It isn’t because of Eqa or WARP3 or anything like that. It’s because - and here now is some anecdotal, subjective, probably bullshit undocumented fan analysis - he doesn’t move anything until he’s in full swing. He just sits there in his little crouch and waits and waits and waits-- and then bang. And when he commits, he commits completely and puts an explosion on the ball. Every swing is premeditated murder. He’s never guessing. It’s terrifying. I hate him for it.
But that’s just how I feel. That has real significance, but it isn’t the end of the world. And if I looked at the numbers, and the numbers suggested that really Pujols wasn’t as good as Ryan Howard (a funny example for me to use but whatever), but I still felt in my gut Pujols was the real ballplayer, I’d hate the numbers and I’d say they were wrong. It’s just that I’m committed to that being OK. I’m OK with finding out that there are certain players who have more value than I think, or that I fell in love with Luis Castillo and decided he was a great player when he really wasn’t. Those things aren’t flaws in the numbers. They’re what’s good about watching baseball, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re what’s bad about statistics. Because I believe that the most important things that happen on a baseball diamond, good and bad, can be and are measured with statistics. A statistic isn’t some arcane invention – it’s just a baseball event. I think that I’m more likely to be wrong, or forgetful, in the short term or over time, than the record of baseball events is going to be.
And 60 years from now, I’m going to tell my grandkids about the way Pujols used to just sit back there until the ball was almost on him, and then explode, not about his WPA. I’m going to tell them about the human part of the experience, because I’m a human being, but, and here’s the thing, but when my grandkids tell me that Justin Upton III is better because he has more quantum triples, I’m not going to have to just argue with them based on how I feel about it. I’m going to say, well, Pujols’ career OPS+ was like 180 in an era when everybody was slugging the crap out of the ball, and he never struck out, and he outslugged Upton III in his peak by about 45 points, etc. Because I think that means something, too. So I like the numbers, too, because 60 years from now, when I tell the little kids about Albert Pujols, they can dismiss me as an old biased fart, but they can’t dismiss .334/.425/.624 as easily. Because that isn’t noise, and calling it noise is certainly not an indication of a more nuanced understanding of the game.
My guy was Devon White, BTW. Was he the best player in the game? No… but holy schmoly, you really had to watch him play center field to appreciate it. I don’t think you can play the outfield better than Devo played it. I would hope the other team would hit drives into center field just in hopes Devo would make another amazing catch. You want a game breaker? Read up how Devon White did in the Blue Jays’ playoff run in the 90s. He was a FORCE, but hardly anyone noticed; he did every with such calm, ease and grace it was easy to overlook.
