From: kbos@carina.unm.edu (Kurt "Some Guy" Bose)
Newsgroups: rec.sport.baseball
Subject: Re: Bonds "choke"?
Date: 2 Oct 92 11:43:47 GMT
Organization: University of New Mexico, Albuquerque

In article <92275.012838RVESTERM@vma.cc.nd.edu> <RVESTERM@vma.cc.nd.edu> writes:
>it is stupid to say bonds is a choke player because he batted .002 or
>whatever in the lcs, because the sample space is really really small.
>
>it is stupid to say bell is a clutch player because he batted five zillion
>or whatever, because, again, the sample space is really really small.
>
>however, it seems to me that a lot of people are going beyond this, and
>saying, "there is no such thing as a choke or a clutch player.  you're
>an idiot if you think there is."
>
>i just can't see how you can deny any of the following statements:
>
>   1) ballplayers are humans, not robots.
>
>   2) different humans react differently to pressure.  some react well,
>      some react poorly.
>
>   3) there is a hell of a lot of pressure during the post-season.
>
>those three things, in my mind, at least, add up to "there are choke
>players, and there are clutch players."
>

Okay, I agree with every point except number two. 

In a pressure situation, there are two things a player can do.  He can succeed,
or he can fail.  He must do one of those things, whether it's a home run in the
bottom of the ninth, or the "clutch" avoidance of an out by walking that manages
to prolong the inning.

From this, some players succeed, or are "clutch", and some fail, or "choke".

It's true that a player can react well in a situation.  However, one would 
suspect of a "clutch" player that he is among the best at reacting well.  And
the problem with this, and with the idea of "clutch" htters in general, is thay
(excuse me, that) they are rarely consistent from year to year.  I submit that
one cannot be a "clutch" player unless he is consistently above average in those
seasons.  Also, (and this is what a lot of people miss), that continuous record
must hold for a large number of people.

We can call clutch hitting a skill, or luck.  Things that are skills are readily
reproducible over a career.  Cecil Fielder is skilled in the area of hitting
home runs.  We know that, because he's hit a great deal in each of the last
few seasons.  But, is that generally a skill in the league, or not?  We know
that poer is a skill all around, because we can usually peg most of the league
at a given power level.  Before the beginning of the season, it was pretty well
known that McGwire, Fielder, Belle, Deer, Tettleton, and Canseco were going to
be among the home run leaders.  One could look a little deeper and predict that
Gonzalez and Griffey would join them.  Joe Carter isn't _surprising_ there, and
Winfield has certainly been on the list before.

Likewise, lots of people could guess that Puckett, Thomas, Alomar, Martinez, and
Molitor would be fighting for the batting title.  I will also add Boggs to this
list, if only to show that nothing's perfect.

But hitting in clutch situations is far from perfect.  Since the "pressure
situations" stats were introduced, and tabulated, an abnormally high amount of
year-to-year variation is present.  The leader one year may be at the bottom of
the list the next year, and somewhere in the middle the year after that.  It
doesn't just do to look and see one guy consistently good at it.  You have to
rank everyone one year, number them, and rank them the next year.  If there 
isn't any kind of a pattern that holds steady _in_the_overall_picture_over_a_
_period_of_years_, you can't use it to predict anything.  And if you can't 
predict _who_ will be "clutch", how can you call it "clutch" at all?

I'm not going to go through and use probability or luck to try to explain the
irreproducibility of this concept.  I will only state that the range of people
who _do_ exhibit year to year consistently is low, and within random
parameters.  The argument of whether luck and probability exist in baseball has
been made so many times that pretty much anyone who isn't a math major who will
believe it, believes it, and those who don't don't.

Just do this.  Take your Elias, and look up the "pressure situation" stats.  
Remember to adjust them for each player.  For example, if Frank Thomas hits .280
in pressure situations, he's a "choke" player, since he usually hits .300.

Now, rank them.

Next year, do the same thing.

The year after that, do it again, and so on.

Do the same thing for stolen bases, home runs, ERA, strikeouts, or other
established skills.  Those lists will be much the same each year.  There will be
individual jumps, to be sure, but overall the lists will remain similar from
year to year.

Is your "clutch hitting" list as stable as those others?  If not, then chances
are you aren't measuring a skill, but just a phonomenon.

-- 
Kurt Bose (as in Daisy, not Rose) * kbos@carina.unm.edu * Make..oh, you know.---
-"The fatal tendency of mankind to leave off thinking about a thing when it is--
--no longer doubtful is the cause of half their errors.  The cause of the other-
---half can be attributed to playing Jose Offerman at short." - John Stuart Mill