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Clutch
Tuesday, May 03, 2011
The hard part is finding the players with that skill. How do you find it so that it’s actionable, it’s useful. And it’s not just a story to tell after the event happens.
Given that statement, what to make of Mike’s article? Is it a red herring? A non-sequitar? Disingenuous? What is the correct term I’m looking for?
***
According to Fangraphs, the best clutch hitter of the past 40 years was Tony Gwynn. Then it was Pete Rose, Dave Parker, Omar Vizquel, and Mark Grace. So, what do you do with that? Gwynn, Rose, Parker, and Grace are going to be in the lineup regardless. Vizquel is the interesting one. You have to decide whether to pinch hit for him or not. But, when did we figure out that he was clutch? Maybe after the 1995 season (after SEVEN years in MLB). And he followed that up with a horrible clutch season in 1996. He was brilliantly clutch in 1999, and then horrible in 2000. In his career, he added 7.3 wins of clutch, or about +0.5 wins a year. Basically, if you thought he was a .320 wOBA hitter, in the clutch he bumped that up to .330 (10 wOBA points gain).
The handedness split is 20 wOBA points. So, basically, even if you accept that Vizquel had a clutch skill, and you were able to locate this skill in him before the 7 years that I figured I *might* have found it, it’s a skill that’s less real than the handedness split.
And this is with the one player who exhibited a skill more than almost anyone else in the past 40 years.
So, let’s just agree that yes the clutch skill exists. But let’s also agree that locating this skill is so difficult, by the time you find it, it’s almost useless. And even if you find it in time, it has barely any effect on your decision-making.
At the top of this page, I have “The Great Clutch Project” link. Read it, learn it, absorb it. And then move on.
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
By , 09:27 PM
While watching the (Fox Sports Houston) Astros broadcast tonight, either Jim Dehsaies or Dave Raymond remarked that there was no such thing as clutch hitters - that the hitters who are perceived as clutch are simply good hitters. He also said that the “evidence” was that some years players have good clutch stats and other years they don’t (IOW, there is not a good y-t-y correlation). He didn’t articulate quite that way (about “one year to the next"), but that is what he apparently meant.
Finally, he mentioned that he once asked Merv Rettenmund (famous hitting coach) about clutch hitting, and that Merv looked at him askance and said, “There is no such thing.”
I’ve been watching baseball a lot for many, many years, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard a TV announcer speak with such heresy. Nice to see/hear…
Thursday, September 02, 2010
ESPN’s Mark Simon is carrying the WPA torch:
From 2007 to 2009, Howard not only has the highest Win Probability Added in September/October, but he dwarfs the second-rated player on the list--Cardinals first baseman Albert Pujols. It’s not even close. That’s true, even if you stretch the data back to 2006.
Sabrmetrician Bill James awarded Howard his “Clutch Player of the Year” award in 2009. James knows of what he speaks.
Tom Tango, the same person who devised the Win Probability Added formula, also has a formula for “Clutch Rating.” In figuring a player’s clutch rating, you look foremost at situations that are high-leverage, in which the game is on the line in that turn.
Thursday, July 22, 2010
I’ve had this on-again, off-again idea for an intangibles survey. I did a basic one (on clutch) a few years ago. Now, Jeff has brought it back to on-again, for now anyway. The idea is simple enough: give me at least three, and no more than seven, traits that we would want to ask the fans of those teams to tell us about the players. I would run the survey in the off-season.
Here’s what I was thinking:
1. Clutch (Is this one of the guys on the team that you want to see with the game on the line?)
2. Playing smarts (baserunning, relays, etc; is he impressively smart or frustratingly clueless?)
3. Hustle (Is he giving his all?)
4. Non-game work ethic (party animal? gym maniac? family man?)
5. Color of skin (not an intangible, but a question of perception)
Anyway, so give me your list, and if we can come up with something good, I’ll run it in the off-season.
Friday, July 16, 2010
Some eye-popping numbers that Phil found in a study:
The score differential is from the perspective of the shooting team, and the “%” column is actually percentage points.
-5 points: -3%
-4 points: -1%
-3 points: -1%
-2 points: -5% (significant at 5%)
-1 points: -7% (significant at 1%)
+0 points: +2%
+1 points: -5% (significant at 5%)
+2 points: +0%
+3 points: -1% ("also signficant")
+4 points: +1%
+5 points: -1%
Thursday, July 15, 2010
Sean added Clutch to Play Index. And here you go. The greatest single-season clutch: David Ortiz 2005 at +3.4 wins followed by +3.3 wins of Eddie Murray 1985 and Mickey Stanley in 1968. The guys who saved all their best performances for when it didn’t count: Bill Mueller, 2003 at -3.5 wins, and Gary Gaetti 1983 at -3.3 wins. ARod’s 2002 was fourth worst at -3.2 wins. I just love when a stat verifies the obvious (Ortiz and AFraud), and gives you the expected (Eddie Murray), and so adds legitimacy when you get some surprises. Bobby Thomson’s 1953 comes in at -2.9 wins in Clutch.
And, the career leaders:
+13.4 wins Nellie Fox
+10.5 Tony Taylor
+10.0 Tony Gwynn
+9.3 Pete Rose
...
+6.1 Mark Grace (23th place)
+6.1 George Brett
...
+5.7 Ichiro (34th place)
...
+5.4 Tim Raines (39th)
This list goes toward what the fans were telling my in my Color of Clutch project: they love the guys who put the g-dd-man bat on the g-dd-mn ball.
And the guys whose stats were compiled when the game mattered the least:
-16.8 wins Sammy Sosa
-15.9 Frank Robinson <--- !!!
-13.0 Jim Thome
-12.7 Lance Parrish
-10.6 Mike Schmidt
-10.2 Richard Hidalgo
-10.0 Jermaine Dye
...
-8.9 ARod (12th place)
-8.9 Jeff Kent
-8.9 IRod
-8.6 Jim Rice (the man most feared ever)
Tell me you don't love this.
If we take Sammy Sosa, we we see that in the 20% of his PA that were in high leverage situations, he had a .264/.341/.479 line, compared to his career .273/.344/.534. Was this “luck”? Well, do we even care it was luck? It happened. His gaudy numbers did not come as often when the game mattered.
***
If you do care if it was luck, his performance in high lev situations was 2 SD from the mean. Given that this is the most extreme of all the players, it is almost certainly bad luck on Sammy, since *someone* is going to be 2SD from the mean just by luck alone. Still, that the best clutchers are populated by non-HR hitters and the worst-clutchers are filled with big swingers, it’s certainly not all luck. There is *some* clutch skill. In any event, we are not celebrating talent level, but performances. And Sammy Sosa’s numbers were very inflated relative to when his team needed him, and Nellie Fox came through like no one else.
***
Thanks Sean.
Monday, June 14, 2010
Phil:
Gier Jordet, a professor at the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences in Oslo, reports that, when the score is tied, penalty kick shooters succeed at a 90% rate. But when the shooter’s team is behind by a goal, and presumably there’s more pressure, he succeeds only 60% of the time. Wow. That’s some serious choking. The effect is so large I can barely believe it.
I agree with Phil. I don’t believe it. At the very least, is the sample of teams in the behind-by-1 the same as those in the tied? I would presume that teams that are behind-by-1 are already a below average team (or facing an above-average goalie). Maybe? Even then, I can’t believe 90/60.
Even if the 90/60 are the observations, the sample size must be very limited, such that the only thing you are going to conclude is a non-zero difference (definitely possible), but the true difference I’d be surprised if it’s more than 5% (say 75/70).
The reason is because there must be a huge group of players who are little affected, and a small group of players who MAY be largely affected. But, when you see a 90/60 split, it basically is saying that almost everyone is affected to a great deal. And I don’t believe that human beings at the highest levels of their profession would behave that way.
Monday, May 10, 2010
There were a couple of threads at Primer that linked to someone who showed that Steve Trachsel performed much better in high leverage situations than low leverage situations.
Here’s some data to support that.
1. First at B-r.com, whereby Sean uses an LI of 1.5 (or so) and higher for any pitcher’s plate appearance and calls that a high-leverage situation. There are roughly 20% PA in MLB that matches this, and for Trachsel himself, that is 16%. As you expect, a starter has fewer high leverage opportunities than a reliever, but it’s not that much lower. Starters have plenty of high-leverage situations, and Sean tagged 1754 of those as high-leverage. Sean also makes life easy for us by showing tOPS+, which is the pitcher’s OPS+ in a particular split, compared to his overall average. Trachsel is at 88, which means his OPS+ is 12% lower than his overall OPS+. I can’t tell what his overall OPS+ is, but looking at his ERA+, he was probably league average. So, he gives up runs at a rate that is 12% lower than his overall average, or about 0.50 runs per 9 IP.
2. Fangraphs also has split data by Leverage Index, but David uses a threshhold of 2.0 (there’s about 10% of all PA like that… for Trachsel, it’s 6%). David only has the data starting from 2002, but he shows a similar breakdown in his FIP, with his high-Lev performance at 0.50 runs better than his usual.
3. David also tracks “Clutch” which is the difference between the sum of a pitcher’s WPA/LI and the sum of a pitcher’s WPA, divided by the average LI. So, it looks like this: sum(WPA)/aLI - sum(WPA/LI). His Clutch score is +9.9 wins, which is enormous. I would not be surprised if it’s the highest of the Retrosheet time period. Noted choker ARod is at -7.9 wins, and noted clutcher Tim Raines is at +6.0.
So, by the definition of clutch which says “performs better in high leverage situations than his usual overall”, then Steve Trachsel is a clutch god.
But, if the definition of clutch is “performs better in high leverage situations than his peers in the same situation”, then Steve Trachsel is a slightly above average pitcher in clutch situations. By this definition, it is virtually impossible for a great hitter to be considered a choker, and just as impossible for a below-average hitter to be a clutch hitter.
How you define clutch will tell you whether Steve Trachsel if a clutch god or not. Choose your definition first, and then accept the results, whatever they may be.
Friday, May 07, 2010
Interesting what he did here. He ranked all the PA by LI and all the PA by run value, and then ran a correlation between the ordinal rankings of the two.
I suspect that it would be almost impossible to get a high correlation. For example, say that someone actually did have a true talent level that perfectly correlated to LI. What kind of sample performances are we going to get? For example, say that someone’s true wOBA goes from .450 to .250, from LI of 10.0 to 0.01. What sample wOBA are we going to get at LI=10.0? Well, the mean is going to be .450, but the observed can be anything, even a strikeout.
Friday, October 09, 2009
Congratulations Ryan Howard! Howard, already a great hitter (+3.4 situational wins as a hitter), bumped it up to +6.0 wins when you considered the inning and score. The anti-clutch hitter was a tight race, but I’ll go with the D’Backs Chris Young. He already was having a bad season, and his performance in clutch situations made him even worse.
JC argues against:
Identifying clutch hitting is practical problem that requires a decision involving real costs. Should a team factor in clutch ability when choosing between free agents. Should it matter for the manager choosing among pinch hitters? Should a historically big-game pitcher start the playoff series over your regular season ace? Based on the available evidence, if I had to decide between Jeter or A-Rod it’s not even close: Alex Rodriguez is a far superior player to Derek Jeter, and that’s what is relevant.
Actually, clutch hitting is mostly something for fans to talk about themselves. It is NOT a practical problem that teams rely on. To the extent that it is, if teams behave the way fans believe, then the tradeoff is .020 in wOBA. That is similar to the tradeoff in the platoon advantage. And when I asked Yankee fans who they wanted, they did choose Jeter over ARod. And when I did this for all 30 teams, asking if they prefer the better hitter or the clutchier hitter, they chose the clutchier hitter with a wOBA of 20 points worse than the better hitter. They were (partly) exonerated when I tracked their decision and the clutchier hitter ended up 10 points worse than the better hitter. That is, they did in fact perform better than expected, but not good enough to overcome the gap in talent. (That study did not show a statistically significant difference, even though it was based on nearly 2000 clutch PA.)
Anyway, as for actually finding a clutch skill, Andy did in fact find it, and the results are published in The Book. On p.103:
Batters perform slightly differently when under pressure. About one in six players increases his inherent “OBP skill” by eight points or more in high-pressure situations; a comparable number of players decreases it by eight points or more.
But as Andy concludes later on p.108:
For all practical purposes, a player can be expected to hit equally well in the clutch as he would be expected to do in an ordinary situation.
And the reason is as Andy noted on the previous page:
...that normalizing factor of 7600 clutch plate appearances is simply too large to ever predict a specific player to have a significant clutch hitting skill. Put differently, the fact that one of three players performs at least .006 [wOBA] better or worse in the clutch doesn’t mean that we can tell which players have this skill, even when looking at several seasons’ worth of data.
So, the entire problem rests on the fact that the hitting talent in MLB is so narrow to begin with, and that even though we have determined that clutch skill exists in that population of players, it is simply too hard to identify the specific players that it makes any practical difference.
To conclude: yes, clutch skill exists. No, it’s not that big a deal (at best, half as wide as than the platoon advantage). Correct, teams should not rely on clutch skill in their decision-making process, other than as a tie-breaker.
Ass-slap: Repoz.
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Sky makes a great case:
It would appear that at max, a team considers even the jerkiest behavior worth about -1.5 wins over the course of a season. From the examples above, and some intuition, it seems that league average players can be released due to serious “cancerous” behavior, but that above that level, teams would rather deal with the player’s attitude than give up his talent.
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Phil makes his case, and I will email Andy asking for his response.
Monday, May 18, 2009
Devil Fingers takes a players runs above replacement, compares it to RBI, to see who stands out.
Since RBI is a counting stat, I would prefer comparing to runs above zero (Runs Created), not above replacement (RAR). Otherwise, a low RAR guy with lots of PA will look “overrated”, when really he was just “overplayed”.
Saturday, April 18, 2009
Here’s my next one. Thanks to Justin at hockey-reference.com for providing the source data.
Friday, February 20, 2009
This is the summary to the whole Clutch project, over at Hardball Times.
Saturday, October 18, 2008
Joe Sheehan is allowing the possibility that chemistry exists (it does, so no reason to pretend it doesn’t) and that he may have found it. Did he? Chemistry and momentum is one of those things that people will point to after something good has happened, and will forget about if something bad has happened. This is like you go to Vegas, tell your friends you won 10K, conveniently forgetting about the previous time you went when you lost 20K. There are other examples in sports. Like the Pujols/Lidge/Oswalt contrarian situation. Or the more famous Don Cherry too-many-men situation, or Ronaldo’s injury making everyone on the team bleak before the final game, or the stolen World Series in 1985. We tell the 10K wins stories alot more than the 20K losses.
Now, let’s say that you somehow are god-like, and know momentum when you see it. How much is it worth? As we know, a superstar like Albert Pujols is worth some 7 wins, per 162 games, above replacement. That means that if you have a .500 chance of winning with an average team and bad 1B, adding Pujols will make it a .550 team. Something like that. If you have a great pitcher, CC or Doc, you turn a .500 team into a .625 team. How much can momentum be worth? Can it possibly cancel out the Rays bringing in CC Sabathia or Roy Halladay? Can it even cancel out bringing in Grady Sizemore or Albert Pujols or Joe Mauer? Is momentum even worth Willie Bloomquist?
Here’s what you do. Find 10 games from now for the next 12 months that you think has momentum or chemistry written all over it. Bet on the game. Then, come back here, on Oct 18, 2009, and tell me how much money you made. And I don’t want to hear only from the winners.
Friday, September 19, 2008
Here’s the snippet:
His career OPS in high-leverage situations is .975. In medium-leverage, it’s .960. And in low-leverage, it’s .972. That’s consistent with the American League as a whole during his career, when each year batters in high-leverage situations hit somewhere between 1% worse and 6% better than they did in low-leverage situations.... In 2004, he hit 19% better in high-leverage situations than in low-leverage ones. In 2005 and 2006, he hit 17% worse. Last year, he hit 15% better. And this year, he’d hit 32% worse, through Monday.
Thursday, July 24, 2008
Studes:
I’ve got a two-year WPA list for batters involved in pennant races, broken out by age and time period (before and during the pressure-filled months).
As you can guess, nothing there. I have no doubt that there will be something there. (For example, in The Book, I noted that there is an age effect with a runner on 1B. Young hitters aren’t as smart in taking advantage of the hole.) However, whatever we find will be some isolated skillset, something that will be real, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s like finding a 50-foot tree in a forest of 30-foot trees. So, yes, it’s something real, it’s something noticeable, but when you’ve got a forest full of 30-foot trees, if you happen to find a 50-foot tree, it’s not like you’ve found a forest of 50-foot trees.
I’m good at data entry with the numeric keypad. Really really good. Or was anyway at one point. My fingers would fly over those numbers. But, when it came to typing words, and using the letters on the keyboard, I’d be average. If you gave me 20 papers to type, and 19 was for a lawyer and 1 was for an accountant, I’d fly on one of them. But, if all I get to do is expose my real skill 5% of the time, then won’t it be really hard to find that skill if you have 100 people’s results to look at, and you didn’t realize, or think to realize, that one paper might be filled with numbers? And even if you did think to find it, you realize, “eh… it’s real, but it comes to play so little… how the heck am I supposed to find it?”
Friday, June 13, 2008
ARod! That proves that WPA works…
Two of the guys that the Fans chose as anti-clutch (ARod and Atkins) happen to be #1 and #3 on the choking-leader list.
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