Clutch hitting

Yesterday I saw Bill James on 60 minutes. I saw him a few years ago at a SABR convention. His presentation was filled to the brim with convention attendees. It was baseballs version of the sermon on the mount. All that was missing was a box of self filling crackerjack. I had looked at the presentation schedule long before and knew he was going to speak. So I went a picked up a first edition of his Historical Baseball Abstract. After his presentation I had him sign the book. Kinda like my own miracle.

Anyway, I think Bill James is great and most the time way over my head on his statistical analysis. However, I have one disagreement with him. He says clutch hitting doesn’t exist. This has been a debate in SABR journals for years now with folks going back and forth. As an athlete I know all people focus more or perform better at certain points in competition. This may not sound like much but I know in high school cross country I was terrible in the clutch. Yet I was the number one runner on the team. I know that I choked in half the league meets and the state championship. I thought too much about it and blew it. At non league meets I felt no pressure and did great. Now when I went to college I played rugby and nothing was expected of me. Because nothing was expected of me I felt I did pretty good at all games and especially against Norte Dame. I thought I had a really good game. I was focused more on that game and still recall that game more so then any other game I played.

Here is another story. I had a season ticket package to Fenway park in the early 90’s. I always felt that if the game was on the line I would want Dwight Evans to be at the plate, not batting champ Wade Boggs. Why did I think this? Bill James will tell you I felt this for no reason other then my own preference of a hunch. But I think it was due to months watching the two so that my head was telling me logically what I was not thinking in terms of math.

What does this tell us so far? Nothing. It is pure anecdote. However, these things tell me that clutch play exists.

So how do you grade it? How can you put a number to it or rank on it? I don’t know how to do it for pitchers but for hitters I think it is simple. In many of the SABR journal arguments the problem everyone runs into is that the number of clutch situations is so limited that the sample size is not significant. So how do you increase the sample size? Change your definition. You don’t have to have the game on the line. Open it up to having runners on base in front of you and less then two outs. What are the possible outcomes?

1. You can get drive the runner in and get an RBI.
2. You can strike out or pop up or ground out or even walk and nothing happens to the runner. In betting terms, a push.
3. You can ground into a double play. Absolutely the worst thing possible. Not only are you out but you took out the base runner as well.

So take the number of times player grounds into a double play and divide that by their RBI’s. I went through and ranked many of the HOFers and included Boggs and Evens and here is what I got..





Low and behold! You get a lot of the guys everyone always calls great hitters like Mantle and Bonds and Morgan and Stargell and Schmidt at the top. Guys who do not have the reputations of great players are towards the bottom like Mazeroski, Aparicio, and……Boggs. Where is Dwight Evans? He has a ratio of .164 to Boggs .233.

How about last years AL RBI leaders?




Where do you think they rank?