re bases loaded walk gives reds win in in article mssc y u dn netcom com mss netcom com mark singer writes in article c xwai nu news cso uiuc edu hbrooks uiatma atmos uiuc edu harold brooks writes in article mssc xb i cg netcom com mss netcom com mark singer writes actually i think the large scale sample size is part of the problem it seems to me that if we were to plot all the players in baseball in regard to ba vs clutch ba deviation we would get some kind of bell curve the x axis being the deviation in clutch hitting vs non clutch the y axis being the number of players certainly there would be some players on the extreme ends of the bell my supposition is that if we were to find the same players consistently year after year at one end of the bell or the other then we might be able to make some reasonable conclusions about those players as opposed to all baseball players let s be careful here if players performance was completely random in clutch no clutch then you would still expect some players to be good in the clutch every year and some to be not so good every year with two years worth of data you d have of the players good each year bad each year and would have one good and one bad year we have players for years just flipping a coin you d expect players to be good all years and to be bad every year this is what we actually get no of good years clutch performers coin flip random essentially the distribution of clutch performers by number of years of good performance is the same as what you would get if the process leading to deviations from non clutch performance was completely random if there was anything to clutch hitting at least in this definition that had any predictive capability you expect to see the number of players at the ends to be much larger than that predicted by flipping a coin further if you limit yourself to players who were a lot above or below average in clutch situations say standard deviation from the mean more than one year the random explanation still looks good in the four years that i looked at the data from elias there were players with a minimum of at bats in clutch situations that were sigma from the mean two different years of those players of them changed sign between the two years in other words they were great clutch hitters one year and really horrible the other year if it was just a random process you d expect those numbers to be everything that s been measured about clutch hitting over a period of years that could be used to predict any ability with any proposed definition has looked like a random process with the caveat that there may be something related to platoon advantage that could be dragged out of the data e g john lowenstein probably never had a clutch ab against a left handed pitcher but he might well have had some in blowouts so that there would be a bias since his clutch abs would be more geared to his platoon advantage this is not a subject that has been glanced at casually a lot of people have put a lot of effort into studying it and every one of them with the exception of the elias study has been unable to find anything that would allow you to predict how someone will do in clutch situations better than flipping a coin self serving plug follows some of the flaws in the elias study are discussed in my paper in the forth coming sabr book the perfect game by taylor publishing the authors are supposed to get a slice of the advance so go bug your local bookstores now and maybe i can get enough to take my wife to dinner once harold harold brooks hbrooks uiatma atmos uiuc edu national severe storms laboratory norman ok i used to work for a brewery too but i didn t drink on the job p bavasi on dal maxvill s view that florida can win the nl east in
