re bases loaded walk gives reds win in 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 i don t pretend to understand statistical analysis well we agree on the last part cool and thank you for an intelligent response devoid of the silly name calling of others one of the basic things you need to have in a statistic to be able to predict a player s performance on it in the future is for there to be a correlation from year to year a player s batting average is correlated fairly well from year to year ok the basic problems with something like clutch batting average overall batting average is that the correlation from year to year is almost zero adding to the sample size doesn t seem to help much 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 as a counterexample to what you showed consider the following two players from non clutch clutch ab h ba ab h ba maldonado lemon if you had had these two players in by your logic in those clutch situations you d bat maldonado for lemon in a blink of an eye well in maldonado hit in non clutch and in clutch while lemon hit in non clutch and in clutch before you accuse me of completely cooking the data you won t hear those kind of accusations from me it is interesting that you selected maldonado because he is someone whom i have also looked at he has been a very inconsistent hitter in terms of ba hitting in admittedly he has been traded between leagues as well as clubs his clutch hitting record is equally inconsistent so for my purposes in i would not draw any conclusions about his ability to hit in the clutch based on his prior performance i don t know how i would have felt in but you may indeed be right when i looked at sabo i found a more consistent record of hitting and a more consistent pattern of his clutch hitting being proportionately below his non clutch ba ditto for joe carter this probably brings us to the heart of the disagreement i am having with others on this topic must any conclusion based on statistical history be able to be applied broadly throughout a data base before it has any validity is it impossible or irrational to apply statistical analysis to selected components of the data base btw correlating players overall batting average from with gives a correlation coefficient of which is significant at something better than the confidence level correlating their clutch non clutch ba for the same period gives a correlation of significant at no level of any interest i completely accept that reasoning again what if we were to find the same individuals at each end of the spectrum on a consistent basis actually it s technically incorrect to say that we can t predict future clutch performance it s more correct to say that we can t predict future clutch performance with any skill amen the beastmaster mark singer mss netcom com
