It’s the bottom of the ninth with two outs. You’re team is down by three with the bases loaded. The best closer in baseball is on the mound. Who do you want up?
I’m pretty sure the objective answer is “the best hitter on the team.”
Hi, I’m Matt Nadel, and I don’t believe in clutch players. Well, it’s not that I don’t believe that players can be good in the clutch. I just believe that the “ice in your veins” narrative we as fans like to build around our favorite last-licks heroes is not just for the final innings of a baseball game. Being clutch is not a trait I like to use when analyzing players because I much rather use the holistic “who’s the best player you got” postulate. Allow me to explain.
Conceptually, what is the definition of being clutch? In baseball, clutch hitters will win games for their teams when the chips are down and everything is on the line. Coming up in the clutch can manifest in all sorts of ways, but the gap between clutch players in one sport versus clutch baseball hitters (I’m excluding pitchers from this conversation because there’s literally a position devoted to the most clutch pitcher in a bullpen) is quite large, mainly for one reason: isolation. In football, basketball, and hockey, clutch moments rely on the triumph and failure of a lot of people. Call Matt Ryan a choke artist all you want, football fans, but why couldn’t the Falcons play any defense against Tom Brady in the fourth quarter of Super Bowl LI? In baseball, however, while fielders, managers, and Bambino Curses might have to do with the outcome of a critical moment, at the end of the day, it all comes down to a hitter and a pitcher, mano a mano. There aren’t that many more variables than that, so it’s easy to see where a hitter or a pitcher “wins” a given battle.
Before I get to the actual argument against exclusively clutch hitters, I’m going to strip the psychology of clutch situations out of the equation, only because it’s hard to quantify how emotions come into play in big spots that warrant the classification of clutch. Yes, anyone would be nervous in the final inning of Game Seven of the World Series. You’d have to be a robot to feel nothing in a moment like that. But I think it goes without saying that this article concerns professional athletes, who are trained to let their years and years of practice do the talking when the magnitude is the heaviest. Baseball hitters, in particular, spend years clawing through loads of levels to reach the top tier of competition. Any Major Leaguer has at least some semblance of mental fortitude to prepare themselves for clutch situations because the journey of coming to the Big Leagues comes with that conditioning. It’s just par for the course.
So now, let’s talk meat and potatoes: when is a player considered good at playing in the clutch? Statistical analysis can segregate what you might perceive as clutch versus non-clutch moments in a few categories. It just depends on how you define what a clutch moment is, which is the main problem with the “clutch” argument: there’s no consensus to judging a player by their clutch-ness. Do you go off of their stats with runners in scoring position? Maybe a better way is to look at their stats in the later innings of a game, or we can shrink down the sample size to just the ninth/extra innings. Why don’t we get analytical by looking at hitters’ WPAs (win probability added) or their performance in what’s known as high-leverage situations? These questions have dominated the shadows of baseball clutch talk as we learn more about the game within the game, but frankly, there are better ways to predict the outcomes of clutch moments.
For starters, why not look at how pitchers change their strategies? Hitting is reactionary, after all, and if all a hitting team needs is a run, a pitcher might be more selective (and predictable) with what pitches he throws. For example, remember Aaron Judge’s walk-off single against the Astros on June 23 (see the below matchup chart from Baseball Savant)? The Astros reliever who lost that game for Houston was Ryne Stanek, whose fastball can get north of 100mph. The only problem is that Judge crushes fastballs, so Stanek opted to strictly throw subpar low-in-the-zone splitters that Judge laid off of for three straight pitches. Judge noticeably struggles on squaring up pitches lower in the zone as opposed to higher pitches, but Stanek’s splitters didn’t have the bite to get Judge to whiff. On 3-0, Judge obviously had the green light, and Stanek threw him another splitter, this time a beach ball right down the pipe, which Judge slapped casually for the winning hit down the left field line, allowing Jose Trevino to score from second without a throw.
I might talk about Judge a little too much on Twitter (@BaseballwMatt, if you’re interested), but it’s not because he’s one of the most clutch hitters in baseball. It’s because of how cerebral his plate appearances are and how, even though hitting is reactionary, as I said before, he’s one of the few hitters that can manipulate pitchers into throwing their smallest pitches in the biggest spots. His knack for in-game and in-season adjustments leads him to be poised for any situation, whether that situation come with the sun setting at 7pm at Yankee Stadium or when it’s tomorrow and the bright lights are illuminating the façade that encapsulates the Bronx.
Believe it or not, even though Major League Baseball, in the aggregate, performs better with runners in scoring position in terms of batting average, individually, the leaderboards aren’t consistent. The top is filled with a lot of perfectly average hitters that generate some solid plate appearances when the opportunity to score is the highest. A lot of that has to do with hitters’ chase and whiff rates, both of which shrink when pitchers are forced to throw more in the strike zone in order to avoid unnecessary base-runners. That’s one of the reasons Isiah Kiner-Falefa has great stats with runners in scoring position and in later innings; his high contact rate is built for successful hitting when the strike zone shrinks.
I’m not trying to be a SABR metrician with this post, so I’m not going to find a correlation with groups of stats in any setting that might have the ”clutch” moniker. Instead, I'll say this: it’s way more important to look at the individual matchups of a game-deciding outcome than to just declare a hitter prone to coming up clutch. If there’s a power pitcher on the mound and the winning runner on third, would you rather have someone who bats .350 with RISP and an overall strikeout rate of 30% up to bat or someone who bats .280 with RISP and a strikeout rate and walk rate of 15% each? Clutch moments are circumstantial by nature, so rather than go with the bat with the “hot hand,” I’d rather just have the best hitter up to bat in a do-or-die moment. That’s why most “one-play” legends in baseball lore are above-average hitters: they were good before, during, and after the plate appearance that defines their careers.
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