re bases loaded walk gives reds win in in article mssc xb i cg netcom com mss netcom com mark singer writes in article apr pts mot com ep dn pts mot com writes in article g netcom com mss netcom com mark singer writes during spring training i made a similarly innoncent looking comment about clutch hitting on this bb and the flames were flying no such thing as clutch hitting they the sdcn s all screamed i assumed they also meant there was no such thing as any kind of clutch performance given their comments i m still licking the wounds but i do have a rebuttal planned gotta do my homework as they say some deletions rather they showed quite convincingly that past clutch performance has never been able to predict future clutch performance i m sure you are convinced dave apparently so is tony perez i however am not i believe at the time of the sabo plate appearance that juan samuel was on the bench available for pinch hit duty over the past four seasons non clutch clutch ab h ba ab h ba sabo samuel i do not claim that this is a complete statistical analysis that proves the existence of clutch hitting or compelling testimony that samuel would have gotten a base hit i m sure there is something wrong with the sample size or that the basic assumption that clutch performance is random invalidates any conclusions from this limited application or something or other i don t pretend to understand statistical analysis well we agree on the last part 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 a player s ability to walk or infielder s defensive average are correlated better that is to say given their past performance in those statistics we can have a pretty good handle on how they ll do next year put in some simple information about aging and you can do even better one of 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 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 there were players who had clutch at bats every year from according to elias as a simple measure of clutchness let s just look at clutch ba non clutch ba if you use to predict for those players you d find that of the were below league average in that measure both in and in were above league average in both periods and the other were above in one and below in the other if you were just flipping coins you d expect to get above below in both and that switched the difference between the observed results and the coin flip experiment is not statisically significant 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 everyone would agree i hope that a grand slam in the bottom of the ninth when your team is down by three is a very clutch hit there is just no way to predict who is more likely to get the clutch hit based on past performance hitting in clutch situations if you say so dave no way 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 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
