THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Tuesday, August 08, 2006

Ortiz, His Clutchiness Holiness

By Tangotiger, 11:37 AM

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039&sid=ag0oNrarDXIk&refer=columnist_soshnick

Ortiz has hit 21 home runs in 138 at-bats in late-inning pressure situations in the past two years. In that period, no other player has hit more than 13.

http://joyofsox.blogspot.com/2006/08/david-ortiz-in-walkoff-situations.html

Since the end of the 2004 regular season, Ortiz has come to the plate in a walk-off situations 19 times—and reached base 16 times. He is 11-for-14 (.786), with 7 HR and 20 RBI.

In the first case: if we assume .07 HR per PA as his true talent, his 21 HR is 3.8 SD from the mean. If we bump his true rate to .10 per PA, that brings it down to 2.0 SD.

In the second case, if we assume his true OBP is .400, then being 16/19 is 3.9 SD. To bring it down to 2 SD, his true OBP would need to be .620.

As I see it, you can increase his base true talent level up by 50% in clutch situations, and that observed performance would still be 2 SD from his true talent level. A god among men.

We expect 95% of all players to perform within 2 SD of their true mean. So, 20 hitters, just by luck should perform outside that range (10 above and 10 below). At 2.5 SD, we expect 5 such players. At 3 SD, we expect 1 such player. Ortiz is performing at 4 SD from his expected, or less than a tenth of a single player. Given half a century of players, you’ll find one guy above and one guy below this level, by sheer luck.

What is undeniable is that Ortiz has timed his performance for when it matters most. He has one of the greatest clutch seasons of all time last year. And he’s followed that up with something just as striking this year. Whether he timed his performance by sheer luck, or whether he has willed it, or whether the opposing pitchers have quivered in his presence, I don’t know.

Clutchiness. Don’t look it up in a book. You know it in your gut.

The holy trinity of Ortiz, Jeter, and Pujols stand alone. Until they don’t.

• Sabermetrics • Clutch

#1 dan (see all posts) 2006/08/08 (Tue) @ 14:53

Jermaine Dye is making a case to open it up to a quaternity, at least for this season.

Pujols: 2.173 clutchiness (6.561 - 4.388)
Jeter: 1.650 (4.243 - 2.593)
Ortiz: 1.267 (4.965 - 3.698)
Dye: 1.086 (4.101 - 3.015)

#2 MGL (see all posts) 2006/08/08 (Tue) @ 18:44

In Ortiz’ case, I’d really like to know how many of the pichers he faced in those situations were lefty. Like almost all LHB, Ortiz is a completely different batter, depending on whether he faces a lefty or righty pitcher. You really have to do the calculations taking that into consideration.

While manaagers will bring in lefty specialists in the 7th or 8th innings, they tend not to do that when they have their RH closer in the game. That is one of the disadvantages to having a “designated” closer, by the way. There are times when you want a lefty pitcher in the last inning. It is actually amazing to me how often managers do NOT bring in a lefty pitcher to throw to Ortiz when the game is on the line, especially when they don’t have an elite RH closer.

Of course you hear (by announcers) how good and how clutch Ortiz is, regardless of the hand of the pitcher. That is ridiculous. Just look up Oritz’ career splits. Versus RHP, he is indeed God. Versus LHP, he is an average batter or so.

#3 Tangotiger (see all posts) 2006/08/08 (Tue) @ 19:38

He’s about .050 wOBA better against RHP than LHP. The typical split for a LHH is about half that. I’d have to check to see how much to regress that though.

#4 (see all posts) 2006/08/09 (Wed) @ 10:30

MGLs point highlights a slight weakness of the analysis.

In order to generate performance predictions with confidence intervals, you are assuming a rather simple model. Its dangerous to take a model that describes a large population moderately well, and use it draw conclusions a single outlier.

There may (certainly are) other factors that are not included in the model that would help explain Ortiz performance. As MGL suggested, pitchers may vary systematically, which may affect Ortiz’s “true rate” in those contexts. Just watching the guy, its clear that he has trouble against lefties with good breaking balls, and does considerably better against righties and fastball pitchers. Inclusion of this factor in an analysis may change your performance prediction (and confidence intervals) for Ortiz.

just because your model can’t explain the variance doesn’t mean its purely stochastic. Its likely that Ortiz “true rate” is higher than we are giving him credit for, because (a) our model is almost certainly missing crucual variables; and (b) its so extremely unlikely that Ortiz is so extremely lucky.

Of course, we could probably throw the kitchen sink into the model and still be scratching our heads wondering how Papis put together such a performance.

-cdm

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THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Tuesday, August 08, 2006

Ortiz, His Clutchiness Holiness

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