if you believe clutchness exists, then it's going to show up in a stat sheet. Because everything else does. Everything is recorded. So, if some players perform better in "clutch" situations, it'll show up. But it doesn't. Why? I think it does show up in the stats. Maybe not in a career setting, but on a yearly basis. The only reason I can think of is that clutchness is a confidence-based thing, and confidence tends to change year-in and year-out based on early results. Take, for example, Ichiro last year. I believe he batted like 0.450 or something ridiculous with RISP. Now, after two months, if he was batting 0.450, and it wasn't "clutchness" or whatever, then that would not be an indicator of future results. That is, he'd still be likely to bat his normal 0.350 average for future RISP at-bats. Yet, I believe he continued throughout the season to maintain the wacky 0.450-type average. To me, that is some evidence of that clutchness. Yeah, there are players who will waiver month-to-month, and I'd say those players are just lucky and unlucky, or its just statistical randomness. However, enough players seem to maintain those types of results over the course of a year that's it's hard to discount it as statistical oddities / extremes.
haven -- you really honestly believe that EVERYTHING shows up in statistics?? how about the fact that Willie Mays knew what pitch was being thrown by the sign being given by the catcher, and knew the proclivities of the hitter dealing with that pitch, and thus was able to start taking steps in a certain direction in the outfield to make a play on the ball??? you might say, "look at his fielding percentage." but you know as well as I do that it doesn't tell the entire story. sports aren't entirely about stats. baseball isn't entirely about stats. how about a player who's arm is so strong in right, runners don't run on him??? where does that show up? how about big men in basketball who change shots or deter smaller players from even driving inside??? where does that show up??? clearly it has value...but i don't know how you quantify it. and frankly, any formula to try to quantify it would seem suspect to me.
If a player feels pressure in baseball, i.e. in the playoffs, and that affects his performance(which I suspect to be true), then there is such a thing as "clutch."
Let's keep this solely on baseball. I completely agree that you can't quantify even close to everything in basketball. In baseball, yo ucan quantify the things you say. Or rather, their abstracts. Fielding percentage is actually a close to garbage stat. Much more important is "range factor." And yes, it would account for Mays making miraculously good plays upon occasion. And good ones all the time. As for players not runnign on a catcher? yep! We can quantify that. You look at the average # of times players ran... and then how much on particular catchers, etc. Stats, when they get complicated, belong in the field of sabermetrics. You seem to think only of stats that are on the back of a baseball card. Most of these are pretty crappy statistics, to be honest, and don't reveal much. In baseball, you can track anything, just about. And if players are truly clutch.. that's going to show up. If someone really hits better in the bottom of the 9th, with 2 out, and their team down a run... you can look at the course of their career, and see if they performed better than their statistical averages. Or at least, above the average statistical deviation of expected performance in such a situation. But this doesn't happen. So, it clutchness does exist... it's so unimportant that it doesn't even show up in baseball... a sport where any factor can be quantified.
actually i meant players taking an extra base on a right fielder...not running on a catcher... i know the stats you're talking about...though i admittedly don't know how to calculate range factor. i've never seen the stats that indicate that some players don't perform better than others in clutch situations, relative to how they are in normal situations. but again...i don't need numbers to tell me that pressure affects performance...we see that in all walks of life. i've seen it in court...i've seen it in sports...i've seen it in politics...and so on. some people are able to deal with it better than others...
MadMax: Now we're converging to some agreement. I totally agree some people handle pressure better than others. And I'll even agree with this: intuitively, one would think that clutch hitters exist. I just don't see how they could exist, given the #'s we know. And give the reliability of stats in general, in baseball. My personal hypothesis to explain the #'s is that people who don't have clutch ability, to begin with, never make hte pros. Incidentally, you can create a stat for not running on a fielder, although I'm not enough of a sabermetrician to tell you very much about this. It involves something like comparing the # of specific hits to his specific position compared with the # of total bases against the league average. And probably some other stuff . Remember, I'm a silly liberal arts major.
Hmm... I picked one player who I consider clutch and that's Dave Stewart. He not only pitched a long time but he played in 11 playoff series which is a lot. Here are his statistics. Career - 16 years 523 Games 3.95 ERA (Best ever season ERA 2.49) Playoffs - 11 playoff series 22 Games 2.84 ERA This clearly shows he pitched much better in the playoffs against much better competition than he did over the course of his career. Now you can say they're not an equal sample size but I'll tell you if they were equal then the playoffs wouldn't be any more important than the regular season and then we'd not be having a discussion on being clutch.
haven -- and remember...i'm a silly right-brained, emotional person who hates math and numbers!! i like the sappy stories...i like the clutch performers...i like the inspiring side of sports. that's what moves me.... so you can see how my opinion on the topic might be a BIT biased!
Timing: Of course you can find an individual player who didn't play in the playoffs much who performed significantly better in the playoffs. That's as simple as finding a player who happened to have an 11 game stretch at one point who happened to hit very well. Go back across this guy's career, and see if you can find an 11 game stretch where he pitched similarly. Not too tough, I'd bet. In fact, one magazine even found a list of the top 10 clutch hittesr of all time. But nobody had ever heard of any of them. Not a single one of them had a "reputation" for being clutch. And none of them were even that good to begin with. There's a good article about this in the Baseball Prospectus archives, if you want to read it.
But an 11-game stretch in the regular season isn't the same as one in the playoffs. Playoff games are more important. The fact that it's the playoffs is what makes it a clutch performance. You'll never play in as many playoff games as you will regular season games, that's the nature of sports.
http://www.baseballprospectus.com/news/20001024daily.html That one explains why some people like to think of clutchness as real. This one explains a bit about what one finds if one looks at the stats. http://www.diamond-mind.com/articles/neyerclutch.htm
That the problem here. The playoffs aren't just some stretch of games. They're the most important games against the best competition in the most critical of circumstances. Also his stats were 22 playoff games in 11 playoff series over several years not 22 consecutive games over a hot stretch during one season. 22 playoff games is a ton for a pitcher.
Or, you can look at Stewart's regular season ERA in only the 6 years that his team made the playoffs -- 3.30, closer to his playoff ERA than his career ERA. Or, you could look at his ERA in the 5 years that his team made the World Series -- 3.24. Compare that to Stewart's World Series ERA -- 3.47, in the 10 most important games of Stewart's career. I have to agree with haven on the lack of clutchness in baseball. My guess is that there really isn't much clutchness at the highest levels of any sport, where they're making major dollars and cents (or maybe any kind of activity -- like spinning plates, for example), although I might be wrong.
I don't know how anyone who watched the career of Michael Jordan or Vernon Maxwell could say that there isn't clutchness in the highest levels of sport. Vernon is a great example...he was streaky as hell..but when it counted, Vernon found a way to hit the shot, even in impossible circumstances.
I don't know how anyone who watched the career of Michael Jordan or Vernon Maxwell could say that there isn't clutchness in the highest levels of sport. Vernon is a great example...he was streaky as hell..but when it counted, Vernon found a way to hit the shot, even in impossible circumstances. Did he, though? Or did he just take so many last-second shots, that we remember the many that went in? He could still have shot 40-45% (whatever his normal shooting was), but if you take a lot, we fans tend to remember the good ones. [i'm just playing devil's advocate here, because I do like to believe in "clutch" performances, but I understand where haven is coming from looking at the stats. I do wonder if its just something that we, as fans, create.]
i don't remember him taking a ton of last second shots, actually...and i had season tickets back then. i don't remember him missing one....my guess would be that his percentage of hitting the big shot was higher than hitting the average shot during the course of the game. he was the kind of player that would completely disappear and then all of a sudden hit the big shot...man, i loved that guy!!! robert horry might fit in there too...he seems even today to be a far better player in the playoffs than in the regular season...maybe he just tries harder then.
