re: Ryan Howard struck out twice tonight in 4 at bats

no, LE thinks Silver is dumb b/c he uses stats to make a point. You need to get inside players head to get the truth on things like moxy

This thread is a frick.

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ecause one is over a great sample size and the other isn't. and one is random and the other isnt

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How is one random, when you say that in either situation, a player doesnt change in any way shape or form?


One of your points are wrong. Its up to you to decide which side of your arse you are talking out of.

You cant have both. If a great hitter hits well in either situation, then it cant be random.

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How is one random, when you say that in either situation, a player doesnt change in any way shape or form?

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from year to year look at the clutch hitting top10 and then you'll understand how random it is, shittons more random than ERA and Wins

well batting averages change a lot year to year also, just not as much as clutch hitting.

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First, there was Dick Cramer's groundbreaking study from 1977. Dick looked at all players in the 1969 and 1970 seasons. He figured the amount by which they increased their team's win probabilities over the season, and compared that to what you'd expect a raw measure of run performance from their batting line. The difference was their observed clutchness; a clutch player would have created more wins from his raw batting statistics, because his hits would have come when they were more important.

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Comparing 1969 clutchness to 1970 clutchness, Dick found an r-squared of .038 for National League players, and .055 for American League players. Dick's conclusion was that, which such a small correlation, clutch hitting was not shown to exist.

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In the March 1990 issue of By the Numbers (.pdf, see page 6), Pete Palmer tackled the question a different way. He noted that even if there were no such thing as clutch talent, some players would *appear* to be clutch just because of dumb luck. He then figured what the distribution should be if it were all just luck, and compared it to the actual distribution.

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If the two were the same, that would be evidence that clutch hitting is nothing more than random chance. If the two were different, that would show that clutch talent actually exists, over and above the random effect.

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Consider the analogy of coin flips. A fair coin would land eight consecutive heads 1 time in 256. But if 10% of coins were "clutch," with a .600 heads average, you would see eight consecutive heads about 5 times in 256 – five times as many!

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So clutch hitting talent would certainly show itself if it existed in any significant quantity.

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But when Pete looked at the distribution of how player's hit in the clutch, he found it was perfectly consistent with a normal distribution. For instance, out of 330 random numbers from a normal distribution, you'd expect about one of those to be more than 3 SD above or below the mean. In real life, there was indeed exactly one – Tim Raines (.352 clutch, .296 non-clutch).

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clutch hitting were indeed a real skill, there would be a lot more than just one player 3 SD from the mean.

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Because Pete found no "extra" extreme results than what would be expected by chance, his conclusion was that clutch hitting didn't appear to exist.

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Finally, we come to Cramer and Palmer's new study. It's a bit of a cross between Dick's 1997 study and Tom's study – it looks at 50 years' worth of Retrosheet data, but uses the "win probabilities" method.

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The first study calculated clutch performance for each of ten levels of leverage – highest clutch, with the game most on the line, all the way down to lowest clutch, with little chance of changing the outcome (like in a 15-0 ninth inning). Then, it calculated performance for 10 different random subsamples of the games (based on the date).

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Comparing the two distributions, it turned out that the distribution of "clutchiness" was almost exactly the same as the distribution of "datiness". Since datiness is random, this suggests that clutchiness is no less random

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finally, for rookies first entering the league, there was no improvement from their first at-bat (when they would presumably be very nervous) to their 100th at-bat (when they should be less nervous. While this doesn't speak to the clutch issue directly, it does serve as more evidence that players' performance doesn't seem to be affected by their personal stress level.

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Dont try and change the subject.

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i'm not the subject is how random stats are pretty much useless. Clutch hitting is about the most random there is. ERA and Wins are very random as well. Saves are dumb.

here is Mr.Clutch himself David Eckstein

LINK

oopsie, his career "clutchness" is negative. what had happened?

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Have you read this thread entirely?

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Yes, I have (well, except for the last page now, I'll catch up). I think you’re trying to read too much into people’s arguments. And I certainly can’t speak for other people, but your demand that stats absolutely 100% repeat has not been asserted in this thread. You have ably and effectively knocked down that stawman. Congrats. That’s not the argument in this thread.

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You are taking the argument and stretching it out now. I never once said that the same players are always at the top.

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After you have stretched others arguments to the breaking point, this is a pretty funny claim. But I am not even saying you argued that, I am saying that for a skill to be repeatable, the league leaders tend to be the same. Will it be 100% crossover? Of course not. But two of the more repeatable skills are homers and strikeouts and the leaderboards look pretty similar each year. I’m not arguing that you made this assertion. This is my assertion. I made no claim you made this argument because it is my argument. I’m trying to help you understand what I mean by a “repeatable skill”.

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Good hitters usually have better physical skills and better mental makeup than your average player, thus they often come through in tough situations.

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Well, yes. And just because it’s obvious doesn’t mean its not right. That’s kind of our point. To step back, here’s my essential argument, which, as you state, is intuitively obvious:

1. Measurable skills tend to be repeatable. Power hitters keep hitting for powers, speedsters steal a lot of bases year-in, year-out.

2. Clutch hitting, to be a real skill, needs to measurable and definable. I define it as such: a player hits better in close and late situations.

3. Good hitters tend to have good numbers in the clutch. They also have good numbers in non-clutch situations. It’s because they are good hitters, not because of some innate clutch ability.

4. There is no demonstrated ability in stat lines to show that the same players continually hit better in the clutch. Some seasons a player hits better, some seasons worse than he does in non-clutch situations. It’s not the raw numbers in how did you hit in the clutch which would show clutch ability, but a hitter’s improvement over hitting in non-clutch situations.

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Why does that discount the fact that they hit well in the clutch?

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It doesn’t. It just means there isn’t some clutch skill they have. They are already good hitters. I’m not arguing that there is no such thing as clutch hitting, I’m arguing there is no such thing as a clutch hitter.

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It's like saying "Randy Johnson,throws hard and has some good pitches, thus strikes out a lot of batters, but he doesn't have some special strikeout skill. It's just because he is a good pitcher."

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No, it’s not. Randy Johnson’s success is derived from his ability to strike people out. Pujols’ success is not derived from his ability to hit in the clutch, it is because he draws tons of walks and then hits the ball with power.

A better parallel would be saying that Randy Johnson doesn’t have some special skill to pitch in the 5th inning, even though he regularly puts up good numbers in the 5th. He doesn’t do so because of some innate 5th inning skill, but because he’s a good pitcher.

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seriously, make up your mind

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my mind has been made up from my 1st post.

It's since baloo just summarized everything i've told you, i'll let you aregue him now. I've lost my mind. maybe if he keeps telling you then you will get, but magic eight ball says "highly unlikely" you could probably also use magic eight ball to predict clutchness

LE's brain scope is just larger than ours I guess