THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Friday, October 09, 2009

Clutch skill DOES exist

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.