Introduction

Clutch hitting is back in fashion in the baseball research community. For years, many of us had looked in vain for the existence of some persistent clutch hitting ability and, failing to find it, had come to the conclusion that such an ability must not exist. The pioneer of this approach was Dick Cramer, who wrote an article on this subject in the 1977 Baseball Research Journal, but many of us have done similar studies over the years. First, you determine who performs better than normally one year in "clutch situations" (and the definitions of these situations change from study to study) and then you see if these players have a tendency to repeat their performance the next season. They don't, which has led a generation of baseball researchers to roll their eyes whenever announcers start rhapsodizing about Joe Blow's ability to come through when it counts.

In "Underestimating the Fog", an article in the 2005 Baseball Research Journal, Bill James argues that we were wrong to think that such an approach "proved" anything. There is so much random noise inherent in this method, so much "Fog", that we shouldn't expect to see anything when looking for clutch ability in this manner. Well, I might get around to testing this hypothesis at some point, but for now I thought I'd take a different tack. I thought it might be interesting to compare a player's ability in both clutch and non-clutch situations over the course of his career. So I'm not really looking for persistence in results from one year to the next, but rather I'll be looking for results that are not what we'd expect to see if there were only random forces at work. Hopefully, dealing with much larger groups of at-bats will help to thin out the fog somewhat.

So who were the greatest clutch hitters from 1960 to 2004?
Just who I expected to see: Bill Spiers, Wayne Garrett, Rennie Stennett, Rick Miller....

Davo's head will explode

Davo's head will explode