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Clutch
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.
Friday, June 06, 2008
David gives us the cool graphs.
OBP2 refers to OBP, with the IBB removed from consideration. As you can see by OBP2 and SLG, the Fans are demolishing my great hitters. The gap is about a 23 point wOBA advantage for the Fans in high-leverage situations. This is doubly-impressive in that the Marcel expectation for the season overall was a 20 point disadvantage for the Fans. We are now at 750 PA. 1 SD = 19 wOBA points. So, the Fans are giving us a 43 point swing in wOBA over my guys, which is a separation of 2.3 SD. Since we are talking about two samples, I suppose the correct thing is to say they are 1.6 SD apart. Not enough for us to proclaim anything, but enough for us to now be on the edge of our seats.
You will notice that the gap is almost entirely due to the extra Ks my guys are making. BABIP (which excludes Ks and HR) are even. The % of hits that are extrabase hits is 35% for both. My guys are doing a bit better on the walk side. Clearly, the Fans selected guys who make contact, and my selection, overall, was simply the best hitters.
I’m going to give a big kudos to the Fans here as they were simply way behind the eight-ball in terms of selecting guys who were overall worse hitters, but their guts were telling them to go for their clutch hitter. In one of the most ridiculous choices, choosing Jeter over ARod, the Fans are winning that one.
We already knew that the Clutch skill existed, as per The Book. What we had a hard time finding, via the numbers, is the guys who possess this skill. It’s possible that, via the fans, we’ll have a much easier time of finding these hitters. Anyway, let’s not get too excited just yet. We still have another 1500 PA for each side to go through. Lotsa game left.
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
The greatest sabermetric post that you will ever read regarding intangibles. And all without a number. Just fantastically written. Here’s a very few of my favorite snippets:
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Thursday, April 03, 2008
Here’s the details. And Fangraphs is tracking it on a daily basis. Much thanks to Studes for the exposure and Appleman for making it easy for us to follow.
Wednesday, April 02, 2008
Very cool article by Colin.
Because in the narrative, clutch hitting does have to exist. If you’re trying to boil a ballgame down to a simple narrative… then you are boiling the game down to a handful of plays, and thus making those plays stand in for the entire game. You create heroes and villains, successes and failures, tragedies and comedies. In the narrative, you have to have clutch. Have to.
Saturday, March 22, 2008
Time to put up or shut up: Go.
Wednesday, March 05, 2008
Fangraphs now has clutch pitching stats. The sum of the PA by PA WPA/LI is under the column WPA/LI. In 2007, Putz was +2.4 wins. In 2006, he was +2.3 wins. This is a context-specific performance, but with the leverage aspect depressed. The sum of WPA divided by the average LI gives you the expected WPA/LI, based on how he pitched. The difference between this number and the WPA/LI is his clutch number. In 2007, Putz had a clutch wins of +1.2 wins. Basically, if you look at how he performed with the LI of 2.0 or greater, he was likely unbelievable. You can get the leaderboards for this stat. What this will give you is essentially those pitchers that performed great in the high LI situations and/or really bad in the low LI situations.
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
By , 11:38 PM
I don’t know if Tango has officially launched his clutch project or not, or will in the near future (obviously well before the season starts), but, I would really like to see this thing happen. However, I want to up the ante a little and expand the project. I want to get sportwriters (and TV and radio commentators) and possibly some baseball insiders, like coaches, managers, and even players, involved, as well as the fans.
We will need to enlist the help of someone like Rob Neyer and/or any other “insiders” that we know or can get a hold of (Bill James, Peter Palmer, Gary Gillette, etc.). And get some exposure on the other blogs and sites of course.
I would also like to extend it to at least one other thing and possibly more. Pitcher/batter matchups, as I explained in another post, should be easy. Each participant, like with the clutch and choke players, would choose X (maybe 5) good and X bad pitcher/batter matchups. As I said before, is there any fan or commentator/sportswriter/player/manager/coach that does NOT think that some batter/pitcher matchups are better than others (besides the platoon advantage of course)?
I would also love (since this is the thing that commentators talk about - incessantly - most during game broadcasts, and this is the thing that people claim they can “see") to see something done with hot and cold players. The only way I can think of to do that would be to have a website where any participant can log in, input their “user id” and classify someone as hot or cold until further notice. That should be easy enough for all those pundits who think they can tell when someone is “pressing” or “seeing the ball well” or “locked in” or whatever you want to call it. Again, is there anyone but an analyst or saber person who does NOT believe in players being hot or cold?
Here is the kicker. I am willing to donate a substantial sum of money to a charity chosen by one side of the debate - the “non-sabermetric” side of course, if they win. We would have to define “winning” - maybe best of 3, if we do 3 things, like clutch, batter/pitchers, and hot/cold. Or we can do each one separately.
If the sabermetric side wins, I will also donate money, but that will be to a charity of our choice and it will be less money.
I’m not sure how much, but it would be on the order of $10,000 for them and $5,000 for us. What the heck. Anything to make a point. If this flies, let none of my/our detractors/naysayers EVER say that I won’t put my money where my mouth is! This should generate some good publicity and might encourage the media and perhaps some insiders to participate.
Any other ideas?
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
From 2003 through to 2006, Manny Ramirez’ BA/OBP/SLG line was .311/.412/.602. David Ortiz during the same time period was .294/.391/.609. Not a whole heckavualotta difference. If you had a crucial situation in 2007, who would you prefer to have up there? How about Jason Giambi (.250/.409/.514 ) or Bobby Abreu (.296/.416/.487)? David Wright (.306/.375/.527 ) or Carlos Beltran (.278/.368/.517)?
So, this is how I envision my Clutch project:
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Tuesday, December 11, 2007
Ditto.
Tuesday, October 09, 2007
If ARod had the series Jeter had, we’d never hear the end of it.
***
Since ARod joined the Yankees, he and Jeter have had an almost identical OBP, and ARod’s slugging is 30 points lower than Jeter. The big difference is that of the 110 times that ARod has come to bat, he’s driven home 5 runners on base. Of the 115 times Jeter has come up, he’s driven home 12 runners. I’d hate to look at ARod’s post-season stats with men on base.
Tuesday, October 02, 2007
Congratulations to Vladimir Guerrero, for the timeliness of his performance, clutchiest in the league. Using Leverage Index, we can look at the 100 times when it counted the most (LI of at least 1.61, average of 2.31) and compare his performance to the 100 times when it counted the least (LI of at most 0.29, average of 0.13). Because of ties, it’s actually 102 and 101, respectively. IBB excluded.
Here we go:
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Saturday, March 03, 2007
I’ll let David explain it:
http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/index.php/win-probability-changes/
A-Fraud was the biggest choke hitter of 2006, which everyone already guessed. Now, we have it quantified
http://www.fangraphs.com/leaders.aspx?pos=all&stats=bat&lg=all&qual=y&type=3&season=2006
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
In this blog entry, Charlie Pavitt looks at hypothesis testing and clutch. I made a couple of comments in that thread, most notably that you can achieve a correlation coefficient of .999 if two things have even the slightest possible relationship.
In the BTF thread linking to the Pavitt entry, Wille Keeler asked:
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Wednesday, December 27, 2006
I like the idea behind Eric Van of dramtic homeruns. You can quibble with the definition if you like:
A “dramatic HR” either gives you the lead in the bottom of the 8th, or ties the game or gives you a lead in the 9th or later.
You can be more strict by saying something like “the WPA changed by at least .300 wins”. Or coming up with a broader english definition that is based on the “at least .300 WPA” rule. But, the more important point is that it bring WPA into the spotlight in an english-like setting.
Rather than saying that Pujols, Jeter and Ortiz were +2 wins in the clutch in 2006, it’s more impressive to give us their BA/OBP/SLG numbers in very high leverage situations (which you can define as LI of at least 3.00, or whatever broad english statement would encompass the LI of 3).
Friday, December 15, 2006
Eric Van says:
I calculated the total CluRat for 2002-2005 and compared it to CluRat for 2006, for the 27 guys who pitched 20 or more innings in 2006. Would you expect CluRat to have any predictive value? The correlation of 2002-5 CluRat to 2006 CluRat is .47, hugely significant at p = .01. ... The worse CluRat for 2002-5? Rudy Seanez. The worse for 2006? Rudy Seanez.
His long equation is really this:
(IP * 5.00 / 9 - WPA / pLI * 10.81) / R
where the first part, IP*5/9, simply gives you the league average runs, and the second part, the WPA*11/LI tells you how many runs better than average he was. It’s possible that what we’re seeing though is a bias in the equation. He uses 10.81 as a constant, when in fact it should differ. However, he is likely saved in that a relief pitcher only pitches 1 or 2 innings, and therefore, doesn’t perform long enough to effect his run environment enough to change the runs per win value of 10.81. But, maybe I’m wrong.
Wednesday, October 11, 2006
I don’t know if I have a very mild or extremely strong annoyance to http://www.slate.com/id/2151273/
While the clutch-hitting question has spawned piles of research, clutch pitching is a phenomenon that’s gone essentially unexamined.
Nevertheless, Andy did examine the issue for THE BOOK, and there is a skill component to it. It might not necessarily be a “men on base” situation, but rather simply a change in pitching motion (full windup v step). And Glavine’s splits are rather incredible.
The peripheral ERA is a little problematic, because things like WP, PB, BK may or may not be included.
Monday, October 02, 2006
Fangraphs has the data, and here are the results.
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Thursday, September 21, 2006
The biggest thing I hate to hear about the MVP talk, aside from the MVP talk itself, is the “he only does it every 5th day, not every day”. Would you rather watch a new two-hour Chris Rock concert once a week, or Jon Stewart four days a week, half-hour each time? Would you rather have a co-worker that surfs the web 4 days a week, and works 8 hours on the other day, or works 1-2 hours a day, and surfs the web the rest of the day? Six of one: meet half-dozen of the other.
Justin Morneau has faced 614 pitchers. Johan Santana has faced 867 batters. Does it really matter that Santana’s opponents are more concentrated, and Morneau’s more spread out? Enter WPA:
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