Do you believe in clutch?

As do Drew’s Close-and-late and tie/1 run game stats.

You have no idea the hell you’ve just unleashed on yourself, especially on this site.

Or is there something about his playing you don’t like? I think Theo would be ill-advised to make roster decisions based on your personal gut feelings about people.

Also, you are just incorrect about Drew. I’d go more into detail about it except that I already did in the article up there.

the only lineup switch we need is to move Drew higher.

just under-informed.

I was going to post about momentum-suckers as an inside joke…

what does it matter that a batter gets walked in the late innings of a game in which we are trailing? sometimes walks create a double play scenario. besides that, what does a walk do? – make it the next batters responsibility to get on base or knock in the needed run? losing by 2 late means we would need 6 consecutive walks to win with this strategy.

You can’t knock a guy for getting on base because it creates DP possibilities, that’s ridiculous. A walk gets another runner on base. If there’s a man on 1st, it moves him up. If there’s men on 1st and 2nd, it moves them both up. If a team is down more than 1 late, it means they need MORE BASERUNNERS, because scoring a single run isn’t worth much.

ops of .894 is very good, on average, over a season. but it doesn’t do anything to the bottom line if your team doesn’t score. and what if his ops was 5 million prior to the 8th inning but 0 run production after the 7th? you can’t stand there with the bat on your shoulder with risp and watch the 3rd strike, while looking for the walk.

Close and late has already been brought up, but either way a run in the 3rd is worth just as much as a run in the 8th. They don’t count for double if the game is almost over. And Drew doesn’t “look for the walk”, he looks for his pitch. If he doesn’t get a pitch he thinks he can hit, he won’t swing at it. This leads to less weak groundouts and pop flies. A few less balls that randomly squeak through holes, but better production as a whole. I’ll take that tradeoff.

bill james revolutionized baseball analysis and the stuff he released to the general public takes into account a ton of data averaged over a season (or a bunch of seasons), so, a walk to lead off the game gets the same ops # as a single in the 8th with 2 risp. however.. which is better? the general public numbers don’t tell us everything.

Incorrect. A walk that leads of the game contributes a 1/1 to OBP and a 0/0 to SLG. A single in the 8th contributes a 1/1 to OBP and a 1/1 to SLG. But a single to lead off an inning and a single with runners on reflect the exact same on a hitter. Drew does not control the runners who get on ahead of his hits, and hell, they had to get on in some way too. Are they any less or more to credit for the runs than the man who bats them in?

getting on base is the primary responsibility of an offensive player – on average. a winning team needs a balance, of on-base and run production.

Those are two interchangeable terms. OBP is one of the best indicators of how many runs a team scores—certainly more so than average, and by virtue of that, any possible combination of average and OBP. wOBA is better, but Drew is pretty damn good at that too.

your’ argument about jd bellhorn being unclutch was stronger than your conclusion. i can’t help to feel you believe this board over rates jd but you were afraid to pull the trigger of honesty. you are a writer – write what you think – feel me?

As a fellow writer, that’s kind of offensive actually. It looks to me like Wolf knew exactly what he wanted to say, and said it well. You can disagree all you want, but don’t tell him and the rest of the site what he does and doesn’t think. Don’t call him out for being a coward just because he disagrees with you.

In a clutch situation, I would rather have a batter who is watching the ball well and looking for the right pitches than just trying to take every one over the fences. This is why I thought the OBP was important for this- and walks never hurt. I like that he doesn’t give into the pressure and contniues to see the ball well in high pressure situations.
I think the number that should stand out particularly is the .216 BABIP with RISP. That speaks volumes.

There’s information about how he performs in late innings- I chose to ignore it because I don’t really feel it’s an accurate enough sample size- he doesn’t go to the plate in every inning every game and goes to the plate a lot less frequently in the 9th inning than say, the second inning. I just think those numbers get skewed and are misleading.

For the record, I thought I was clear, but I am a big Drew fan. I think he’s one of the most productive, useful members of the team.

I like Amalie Benjamin a lot, but I like the Abraham’s posts tend to be more stat and game result focused and what Amalie writes tends to be more storyline information. Not that it’s all she does.

But yeah, sole voice of reason was incorrect.

sabermetric library

1) As far as I can tell, though, there is no particular trait that allows someone to knock in a run in the 9th more often than their ability to knock in one in the 1st.

That is why numbers in “clutch” situations fluctuate wildly from year-to-year-to-year. Is there a reason why David Ortiz hit .263/.371/.395 in late inning, close-game situations in 89 plate appearances? Did he have a clutch slump or something?

About 33 years ago Dick Cramer figured out there was no such thing, mathematically, as clutch. Bill James decided his study was off, his results correct, and decided to then improve on and re-disprove the myth of clutch. A little under 20 years ago, David Grabiner came up with this, a report which found there was basically 0 corellation between the year-to-year differences between a player’s standard batting, and their batting in clutch situations compared to the league average:

The correlation between past and current clutch performance is .01, with
a standard deviation of .07. In other words, there isn’t a significant
ability in clutch hitting; if there were, the same players would be good
clutch hitters every year.

My favorite part of this study is that Grabiner brings up Darren Daulton as “the biggest statistical choker in the major leagues”. The year after the report was published, Darren Daulton had an OPS 100 points higher in late and close situations (110 PA).

Now, there may be players whose styles are less conducive to getting the clutch hit (because yeah, there’s definitely hits that can be defined as “clutch”, just not any reason to believe any player is better at getting them than he is regular hits), and I’m sure Drew is one of them to some extent. He doesn’t focus on putting the ball in play because he’d rather get the big hit then take his chances on weak contact, and he’d rather walk then swing at pitches that are likely to result in outs, knowing that if the next hitter just follows the same formula they are more likely to score runs then if he swung away when the pitcher didn’t give him anything to hit.

The idea that Drew has a tendency to just take called strike 3s when the team needs a hit much more than it needs a walk (so, say, man on 2nd down 1 in the 9th as compared to man on 2nd down 2 in the 9th) is pretty damn overstated. That I can see (thanks to BBRef’s suddenly very useful Play Index tool now that I know how to use it) he’s done it 3 times in 3 years with the Red Sox. Maybe four or five times if you consider in the 7th, down 2 or 3 to count, since I guess they could use that run, but they could also use that baserunner.

4) I get that, but you were talking about hits instead of walks, so that you seemed to be promoting average, or at least some sort of average + slugging combination. And generally speaking, it’s better to take a pitch you don’t think you can hit in anything but an -2 count then to swing at it. You may end up a few average points lower, but more runs will be produced in those situations because it will keep you out of crap contact. Higher slugging, and more production for the next person in line too, most likely.

5) My problem is that you claimed that Wolf meant something other than what he wrote, and that he was somehow afraid to write how he felt—which was coincidentally how you felt. I just think that if a person writes or says something, nobody should tell them that they don’t mean what they said and sort of accuse them of being unauthentic and bowing to public pressure unless there’s a very real indication that that’s the case.

i like james’ article too.

david grabiner’s original analysis 20 years ago started by attempting to disprove clutch by lack of “proof” over the long term. (lack of proof does not mean lack of existance). he wasn’t objective. this was one of two issues i had with his analysis – the other being his std deviant of 116 being too high. i couldn’t figure that one out – doesn’t mean he wasn’t correct but i wasn’t comfortable with it and therefore his analysis

It seems like a legitimate point, but at the same time I like James’ needle in a haystack sort of analogy more than the fog one. After the fog one, it seemed to me like his opinions on most of those debunked theories tended to veer more towards “There is an army, just it’s likely a very small one” as compared to “we can’t know”, though that’s easilly explained by just personal opinion on a nearly unanswerable question.

And also that it’s mostly to do with walks and strikeouts as per usual. Given that many of the guys on Silver’s list are guys who quite simply seem to walk even more than they strikeout, which is in itself a pretty big thing, I wonder if this is more a reaffirmation of the age-old adage that not making an out is the most important thing in the game. Silver suggests that this is a matter of guys making adjustments, but I look at that info and wonder if it’s not about guys keeping their approach the same. Not going out and thinking you need to hit the ball, but just staying back and letting the game come to you.

As for the last bit of your post, I don’t know if it’s a joke based on the earlier conversation, but if it’s not than that’s exactly the sort of thing that would make this into an argument, and similar to the sort of thing I was annoyed about in your post to Wolf. I think we can generally have disagreements on this site without having to resort to questioning the integrity of those who disagree with us. If you’re going to make an accusation, than make one, but you’d better have a lot more evidence then “I look at your stats and see something different” and “You’re not up-to-date on research in this field.”

he is NOT done!

definitely some people let the stress of those situations negatively affect them. I think, however, that after most players have been in the majors a few years, that seems to dwindle away and there don’t seem (to me) to be many players who are consistently more reliable in clutch situations than other situations.