I was perusing the Baseball Think Factory and came across this rebuttal to a rebuttal of a Bill James article which I didn't read. Apparently, there's still an issue of whether or not clutchness exists and if it does exist, which hitters are clutch and how do you find them.
Now, you may laugh, but there's a human element involved here, and until somebody implements my definitive process, we're never going to find out who's clutch.
Unfortunately, for history's sake, my definitive process will only work going forward. Somebody has to implement this NOW!
Here's what you do:
- Attach a heart and blood pressure monitor to every single player in the league to be worn throughout the season.
- Whenever a player's heart rate and/or blood pressure significantly differs from his individual norm, check the situation to see if its a clutch situation. Use whatever clutch definition you want.
- After the game, for players who had anomalies in clutch ABs, ask them what happened to get them all riled up.
- Profit
Some players though, will recognize a clutch situation and their physiology will respond accordingly. Their blood pressure will rise. Their heart rate will increase. Adrenaline will begin to flow. As this happens, a player will either settle into the Zone or he'll panic and fail miserably.
The players who respond positively in both their physiology and performance during clutch situations are your clutch hitters. The ones who panic are the guys you pinch hit for. Everybody else is everybody else.
It's that simple. Are you still talking about it? I just figured it out for you. Seriously. There's absolutely, positively no other way to do it besides what I just described for you or with a variation of what I described. If you think otherwise, then you just compared your favorite player to a deck of cards or a pair of dice. In other words, my favorite players have heart. What do your favorite players have?