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March 14, 2005

Bill James Rethinks Clutch Hitting

This is big news: apparently, the great baseball analyst Bill James has an article in the latest issue of Baseball Research Journal in which he suggests many of his most controversial and influential claims - that there's no such thing as clutch hitting, for example - may have been unfounded.

According to the Society for Baseball Research website,

>>>"In his article, “Underestimating the Fog,” Bill James suggests in BRJ #33 that a wide range of conclusions in sabermetrics may be unfounded, due to the reliance, as he puts it, “on a commonly accepted method which seems, intuitively, that it ought to work, but which in practice may not actually work at all.” Does clutch hitting exist? Do catchers have an impact on a pitcher’s ERA? Bill James tackles these difficult questions and more in classic sabermetric fashion."<<<

Salon's King Kaufman elaborates:

>>>"The titular "Fog" comes from the metaphor James uses: "In a sense it is like this: A sentry is looking through a fog, trying to see if there is an invading army out there, somewhere through the fog. He looks for a long time, and he can't see any invaders, so he goes and gets a really, really bright light to shine into the fog. Still doesn't see anything."

The sentry, James writes, reports back that the coast is clear, "but the problem is, he has underestimated the density of the fog." That's where baseball is with the clutch hitting question, and several others he discusses, such as whether there is such a thing as a pitcher's ability to win games, distinct from his ability to prevent runs.

"We're trying to see if there's an army out there, and we have confident reports that the coast is clear -- but we may have underestimated the density of the fog," he writes. "The randomness of the data is the fog."<<<<

This is part of an lengthy evolution for James, as he's moved from the pure number-crunching of his early analysis to a more interdisciplinary approach, incorporating historical research and other kinds of evidence. I think part of his self-imposed backlash stems from seeing what his work has led to: yes, the statistical savvy of "Moneyball" teams like Oakland and Boston, but also the stathead armchair arrogance of websites like Baseball Prospectus, whose relentless attack on conventional baseball wisdom has become its own kind of orthodoxy. The 2005 volume of BP's yearbook, the closest thing we have today to the Baseball Abstracts of old, has plenty of intelligent stuff, but it's marred by the smug prose of writers desperate to prove they're smarter than all those old jocks who run most teams. They're probably mostly right, but they still overstate their case, dismissing anything that doesn't show up in the stats. It's not just that, as is said about economists, they know the price of everything but the value of nothing. It's also that they don't know quite as much about prices as they think they do.

My own thinking about clutch hitting is that clutch hitting per se doesn't exist, but choking does. Put it this way: I can't see why a player with a given skill set could suddenly perform beyond that skill set under certain conditions. If he could, why wouldn't he always play that well? Wouldn't that imply that great clutch hitters are just slacking the rest of the time, playing at less than 100%?

Rather, I think most players play to the best of their ability most of the time. However, there are certain high-pressure situations that stress out even seasoned pros. Professional sports players are used to encountering incredibly high-adrenaline, pressure-packed situations. Every night, they're performing live in front of tens of thousands of screaming fans and hundreds of thousands of TV viewers. But even they occasionally hit a new level of intensity that can shake them up. You can see it at the beginning of a Super Bowl, for example - teams almost always come out tight, making extra mistakes before settling down. And occasionally you'll see entire teams come unravelled - like the Yankees against the Red Sox in the playoffs last year.

So, a clutch player isn't somebody who plays beyond his/her skills in certain situations. Rather, it's somebody who retains all those skills in the face of intense pressure. If many of the other players around that player are "choking" to various degrees, however, the clutch player will stand out. If Reggie Jackson's playing at 100% in October, but the Dodger pitchers are only at 80%, Reggie's doing to look like Mr. October. The fluctuations of small sample sizes will take care of the rest. (Reggie's so-called clutch skills didn't help the Yankees much when they lost in 1981.)

I just ordered the Baseball Research Journal issue with the Bill James article from the University of Nebraska Press website. I'll report back when I have a chance to read the whole article.

Posted by tedf at March 14, 2005 12:56 AM

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Posted by: Jason at March 14, 2005 07:36 AM

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