Coming Up Clutch

Whether you’re a devoted baseball fan or not, the chances are you’ve thanked someone for coming through in the clutch in your life at some point. We all have people who show up for us in times of need and have an impact on our life from that point on; this is the real-world application of clutch. We can employ this word, or this concept, in many settings–the world of sports in particular.

What is Clutch?

Clutch, in baseball, is the concept of having a “big” hit or getting out of an inning you really needed to come out of unscathed. You know the time–when you feel your heart racing a little faster, wondering what’s going to happen next, because whatever it is will matter. The outcomes of these situations aid the team more than usual in grasping the outcome of a win. Simply put, coming up clutch is the ability to perform positively for your team under pressure.

In a 2004 article, Joe Sheehan described clutch as a “well-timed hit, a big defensive play, or a key strikeout that pushes a team towards victory. The biggest moments in baseball history are almost all examples of players doing extraordinary things in extraordinary circumstances. Those moments make the game great, and the players responsible for them deserve credit, and even adulation, for their heroics.”

Sheehan is indeed correct. You don’t look back on the (big World Series game) and remember when (the pitcher) struck out the (batter in the two hole) for the second out of the game, with no runners on. You remember when (big clutch moment). It’s the climax of excitement in baseball games that define the players, teams, and fans involved. They ignite the passion in our hearts and transport us to our childhood daydreams of being a part of our favorite teams taking (and holding) the lead in the most outstanding way. And it was mostly because of that player performing well in the clutch.

Without any mathematical calculations or statistical evaluations, we know clutch opportunities by a simple observation of what’s going on in the game. What’s the count? How many outs are there? How many runners are on? Are they in scoring position? Who’s coming to the plate, and who’s on the mound? All these things contribute to the atmosphere of the ballgame that heightens our expectations and builds a sense inside us that whatever happens next could really have an impact on the outcome of the game.

It has been debated whether a player himself is clutch or can be clutch, or whether it’s really the play that’s clutch just happening by way of a skilled player. A lot has changed in the game of baseball since Sheehan’s article a dozen years ago. So much, in fact, that we now have a way to quantify the situations that matter more in a game and a way to quantify how well a player performed in that situation.

The Clutch Metric

The aptly named Clutch statistic, housed at FanGraphs, measures “how much better or worse a player does in high-leverage situations than he would have done in a context-neutral environment.”

This metric uses Win Probability Added (WPA) and Leverage Index (LI) to solve for X. LI is important–as above, we all can easily identify a high-leverage situation, and Leverage Index is what takes every single game state and tags it with a number, so we can quantify just how important that game situation is. (To read more about Leverage Index and how it’s calculated, click here). Clutch is not a solidified metric and isn’t widely used to assess a player, and perhaps rightfully so. You’ll see why.

We measure Clutch on a scale of negative to positive numbers, with most players landing somewhere between -1.0 and 1.0, with 0.0 being neutral. A 2.0 Clutch suggests an excellently Clutch performance in a high-leverage situation, and -2.0 suggests a “choke” performance.

The player for which Clutch is being calculated sets the standard himself, so that if he’s normally an excellent hitter, hitting excellently in high-leverage situations is not considered Clutch. This metric is a win probability statistic, but it is not useful for predicting a player’s future performance in any way. Consistency, especially under pressure, is difficult to achieve at the major league level, so we can’t expect a poor Clutch one season to indicate the same for an upcoming season, or vice versa.

Clutch Players

When thinking about some of the most clutch players in baseball, several players come to mind. On the pitching side of things, you might think of Mariano Rivera, perhaps for his epic save in the 2000 World Series. The Mets were holding on for dear life after a clutch Game 4 win at Shea Stadium.

There for Game 5, 55,000 fans gathered to watch Al Leiter battle Andy Pettitte. Heading to the top of the ninth, the game was tied 2-2, and Leiter’s ability began to fail him. He struck out Tino Martinez and Paul O’Neill but surrendered a walk to Jorge Posada. Scott Brosius singled just before Luis Sojo found the gap in center field to drive in both runners, granting the Yankees a 4-2 lead.

It was up to Rivera to keep the lead and guide them to the 2000 World Series trophy. The game and the title were in the hands of the famous closer. The first batter Rivera faced struck out in that ninth inning, but Benny Agbayani drew a walk on four pitches. The tying run was at the plate, alerting our hearts and minds to the pressure of the situation.

After Edgardo Alfonzo flew out to right, it came down to Rivera and Mike Piazza for the final out of the game. On another fly ball to center field, the Yankees garnered another World Series championship, solidifying Rivera’s role as a clutch pitcher. He was recognized as the greatest closer in baseball after that, the debate floor permanently closed.

But, when we check Rivera’s Clutch metric on FanGraphs, we see a career -3.52 Clutch! How could this be? Well, one reason could be that FanGraphs’ player pages don’t take postseason statistics into account, but that still doesn’t explain why Rivera fares so poorly. After all, he had plenty of great regular season moments throughout his illustrious career.

When we think about clutch on the hitting side, David Ortiz immediately comes to mind. He’s arguably the modern king of walk-offs, the only recent player to come close to famed walk-off hitters Bobby Thomson, Brooks Robinson and Frank Robinson. This video speaks for itself, highlighting Ortiz’s uncanny ability to snag a hit during high-leverage situations.

Again, though, the clutch metric shows us a -1.12 for Ortiz across his career, which suggests he wasn’t really Mr. October for the Red Sox after all. Right?

Clutch in the Playoffs

And when we think about the most opportune clutch situations in general, we think about the playoffs. These are the most important games of the year–the games with the highest number of opportunities to come in clutch, especially in the games in which it’s win or go home.

The playoffs are an aggressive and decisive battle to prove who is the best in baseball. Naturally, there is an extraordinary amount of pressure in those situations. We have to assume any player making an appearance in this game should be a clutch player, just based on the situation. One hit in the postseason is worth more than a hit in the regular season, by a lot.

In Game One of the World Series, Javier Baez knocking the ball to left field for a base hit to load ‘em up gets us excited. We get thinking, “Oh, man! Did you see Javy’s clutch hit in the seventh?” But it may be that his hit really isn’t far off from how he usually performs, which is what the Clutch statistic actually is measuring.

While there is a Leverage Index in every single situation, a game state with a LI high enough to be perceived by us as clutch happens in a very small sample size, usually to those select few players we have a preconceived notion about being clutch.

The players above are only two examples of where the Clutch metric doesn’t meet our expectations, but perhaps it’s our expectations that are off. It’s widely debated whether clutch players actually exist. Some suggest slight evidence they do, and others present cases against clutch players and only support the fact that clutch plays exist. The differences in a player’s ability during a high-leverage situation isn’t enough to compensate us numerically for the excitement we feel when something amazing happens in the game of baseball.

We’ve tried to quantify a player’s ability to perform in clutch situations and call it Clutch, but what we’ve found is this is a poor measure of what our perception of clutch is. So is the metric right, or is our intuition?

I don’t have the math to disprove the metric, but that’s also because I don’t believe it’s wrong. It’s just measuring something different from what we feel in those special moments in baseball, which is something we can’t quantify. Nevertheless, we still thank our players for performing under pressure and buy into the myth of clutch because it makes the game we love just that much more magical.

References & Resources

• FanGraphs Library
• Joe Sheehan, Baseball Prospectus, “Baseball Prospectus Basics: The Concept of ‘Clutch'”