Tim Lawson wrote:
There's no such thing as "clutch" hitting, or anything else, as a long-term phenomenon. Label an individual at bat what you will.
If anyone needs further argument to support this, check out Dan Le Batard's column on page 12 of the latest (May 8) issue of ESPN The Magazine, which coincidentally addresses this very topic (my copy just came this afternoon, so no accusations of plagiarism, please, when you see that Le Batard observes that "sample size" has no chance against "clutch," "amid fanatics who prefer to believe in abstractions").
Using Derek Jeter as an example, Le Batard shows how the believers in clutch hitting find "myth ... more fun than math."
Among Le Batard's points:
*Jeter would not be legendary if he'd been a somewhat better player but come up with the Pirates
*Jeter has played 115 postseason games (more than Barry Bonds, Albert Pujols and Willie Mays combined; also more than Craig Biggio, Jeff Bagwell, Rafael Palmeiro, and Ted Williams combined), giving him far more opportunity than almost all players in baseball history to accumulate memorable playoff moments (as Le Batard puts it, if you give Miguel Tejada 95 more postseason games, he might have a Jeffrey Maier interference or a Jeremy Giambi non-slide come his way too)
*The year that Jeter missed the first several months of the season because of an Opening Day injury, the Yankees started 18-3, the best start in franchise history
*He had a four-strikeout game in the 2004 ALDS against the Minnesota Twins the same game that so-called "choker" Alex Rodriguez carried the Yankees with a monster performance (and that series went the distance)
*In the subsequent ALCS against the Red Sox, arguably the greatest non-World Series playoff series in Yankees history (and probably more exciting to modern fans than many World Series triumphs), Jeter went 7-for-30 with 3 runs and 2 RBI.
*No player in all of
baseball made more outs to end games last season with the tying or winning run on base than Jeter did.
*Only twice in Jeter's career has he had any kind of hit after the eighth inning to drive in both the tying and winning runs.
*Over the course of the Yankees' run since 1996, Bernie Williams has the same number of postseason at-bats as Jeter: 462. Le Batard writes: "In those at-bats, Williams has six more homers, 11 more doubles, 21 more walks, 33 more RBI, two more runs and seven fewer strikeouts."
*Finally (and this is the most important point), if you average Jeter's career regular-season numbers and his career postseason numbers, they work out pretty much equal to each other, with a slight edge for the regular-numbers. This isn't surprising, Le Batard notes, because Jeter has played 115 postseason games, which is the better part of a regular season's worth of games, so his postseason numbers should be fairly similar to his average season. "That isn't clutch," Le Batard writes. "That's averages averaging out."
To all of Le Batard's excellent points I would add the following:
I am a Yankees fan and I admire Derek Jeter. But I admire him because he is a
really good player, not because he is a
clutch player (and he's not clutch because
nobody is). And I feel about Jeter sort of the way I feel about the American flag: I admire both, but it's hard to actually enjoy that admiration when you're surrounded by people who view them so religiously that they lose all reason when a word of criticism is voiced.