frostingspoon Wrote:
I don't deny that Ortiz strikes out and pops out long quite often earlier in games. That's why he's a .265 hitter and not a .300 one. My point is that when the game is on the line he nearly always comes through. That's not something that can be taught. That's something he just DOES. Whatever science or emotion there is to that kind of ability doesn't seem to transfer to the general populace of power hitters. He's clutch when the team needs to win the game.
There are many other players with higher batting averages who don't win the game late. It'd be nice if Ortiz were a more varied hitter so that his "almost homers" weren't being caught so often in the earlier innings. But that doesn't change the fact that he produces RBI when the game is on the line.
The point was that this isn't provable nor repeatable. It just
seems like it, because the human mind demands explanations. It can't be taught because it doesn't exist. Same goes for Robert Horry.
The Wikipedia entry on
Clutch explains it better, though I left in Jeter's dissenting comment:
The Baseball Prospectus team is hardly alone in their skepticism: various baseball analysts, including Bill James, Pete Palmer, and Dick Cramer, have similarly found so-called "clutch hitting" ability to be a myth. This is not to say that clutch hits, like those listed below, do not exist, but rather that any innate ability to perform well in high-pressure situations is an illusion.
In his 1984 Baseball Abstract, James framed the problem with clutch hitting thusly: "How is it that a player who possesses the reflexes and the batting stroke and the knowledge and the experience to be a .260 hitter in other circumstances magically becomes a .300 hitter when the game is on the line? How does that happen? What is the process? What are the effects? Until we can answer those questions, I see little point in talking about clutch ability." Most studies on the matter involved comparing performance in the "clutch" category of statistics (production with runners in scoring position, performance late in close games, etc.) between seasons; if clutch hitting were an actual skill, it would follow that the same players would do well in the clutch statistics year in and year out (the correlation coefficient between players' performances over multiple seasons would be high).
Cramer's study was the first of its kind, and it found that clutch hitting numbers between seasons for the same player varied wildly; in fact, the variance was the kind one would expect if the numbers had been selected randomly. Since Cramer published his results, many others have tried to find some evidence that clutch hitting is a skill, but almost every study has confirmed Cramer's initial findings: that "clutch hitting," in terms of certain players being able to "rise to the occasion" under pressure, is an illusion.
The explanation offered by most skeptics is that players who have several memorable hits in big games, especially early in their careers, acquire the mantle of "clutch hitter," and fans then unconsciously watch for such hits in the future from those players in particular, falsely reinforcing their beliefs over time. Despite the evidence, many people in baseball steadfastly believe in the idea of the clutch hitter. "You can take those stat guys," Derek Jeter once told Sports Illustrated after SI informed the Yankees shortstop that many analysts deny clutch hitting as a skill, "and throw them out the window."
