The Art of Clutch: Part I

In today's post I am going to discuss something that has been debated by baseball fans and statisticians for many years: whether or not a certain player is "clutch". Certainly, there are some players out there (Derek Jeter anyone?) with the label of being a "clutch" player, but so far there have not been any studies done that prove that some players are more "clutch" than others. Today I am going to attempt to figure out an appropriate statistic that will measure how clutch a player is, and then later this week I will present my results and any conclusions that can be drawn from the findings.

*Note: I am only measuring batting statistics, a study on pitchers being clutch might come later

The first thing I wanted to determine was an appropriate statistical equation to measure how "clutch" a player is. First of all, what exactly is clutch? It is the ability to score runs in clutch situations, those with high leverage. The clutch situation I am going to be measuring is with runners in scoring position and two outs. There are some, shall I say, more statistically accurate measures of clutch, but the situation of 2 outs and RISP happens multiple times per game, giving us a large enough sample size to be able to draw reasonable conclusions. So the first thing I want to measure is the RBIs per plate appearance for hitters with 2 outs and RISP. One adjustment to make is to eliminate intentional walks from the equation, as when hitters are intentionally walked they are not given the opportunity to drive in runs, so they should not be penalized. I am also going to put a C in front of each statistic that is measured from clutch situations to denote that it is a "clutch" statistic. So the first part of the equation is going to be C RBI divided by (C PA minus C IBB).

Now, we need to expand upon our definition of clutch a little bit. Being clutch not only means driving in runs, which varies widely with the hitter, it means that the hitter raises his game as the pressure of the game raises. This means that a hitter who is clutch should have a higher RBI/PA when the game is on the line opposed to his overall RBI/PA. We can measure this by taking the RBI/PA for clutch situations and subtract the RBI/PA for all other situations. This number will represent the increase in RBI/PA that a player will have in clutch situations over regular situations. The formula is a little convoluted, but all pieces are necessary. We can see that the first part is just the piece from above, and the second part is figuring out the RBI/PA for all non-clutch statistics.

The final step for our equation is to normalize the statistic onto a scale of one. To do this, we are going to divide the individual player's clutch statistic by the league average statistic, which is just the same calculations with the league totals for all eligible players used as the numbers in the formula.

What the resulting number will express is the average increase in "clutch" for each player, relative to league average. A number of one means that that player is average in clutch situations, that is, the player drives in an average extra of runs per plate appearance in clutch situations. A number less than one means the player is a below average clutch player, and a number greater than one means the player is an above average player. The resulting numbers will almost always be between 0 and 2, a number less than 0 means the player is downright miserable in clutch situations, and a number greater than 2 means the player is absolutely amazing in clutch situations.

So this is the process to determine how clutch a player is. It will be interesting to view the results, and determine whether or not a player can consistently maintain how clutch they are from season to season.