I have to admit that until I read the article, I was in the “Lopez is having a good clutch” season camp, but the evidence was really hard to ignore.

I think it still boils down to “the great hitters hit” plus a whole bunch of statistical noise and a few contact-hitting outliers and a small effect for some players that tends not to be predictive year-to year and isn’t really a large effect. Mostly, we remember great hitters who have memorable at bats as clutch hitters when, mostly, they are just the same great hitter in the clutch as they are normally.

Yes, there are people in life who suck at handling pressure. Guess what? They don’t make it to major league baseball. They probably don’t even make it to college baseball. The competitive pressures of needing to perform under pressure weed them out at a very early age.

By the time you get to MLB, you have a group of players who have been selected in part for their ability to perform under pressure. And, when they compete against each other, the differences between them are very small.

My two examples:

1) Omar Vizquel on the last play of Chris Bosio’s no-hitter.

2) Derek Jeter’s play against Oakland during the 2001 ALDS:

With Jeremy Giambi on first base, Oakland right fielder Terrence Long hit a double off Yankees pitcher Mike Mussina into the right-field corner. As Giambi rounded third and headed for home, Yankees right fielder Shane Spencer retrieved the ball and made a wild throw intended for Yankees catcher Jorge Posada. Instead, the errant throw missed cutoff man Tino Martinez and dribbled up the first base line. Jeter came from shortstop to grab the ball and flipped it to Posada, who tagged Giambi on the leg just before he crossed home plate for the out.

So, yes it probably exists in some sense, but it’s not significant or measurable for MLB players.

Which is basically what he wrote in “The Book”.

Summed up as, it exists, it is hard to measure definitively, and it isn’t a big difference.

Although it is hard to quantify, it is a fact that all people perform better under pressure.

“Facts” like these are called beliefs.

If someone performs measurably better when it is a “clutch” situation…why are they slacking off the rest of the time? Why wouldn’t a highly paid professional athlete be putting out their best effort all the time?

Please investigate the links in the outline that is the subject of this post. Read the SABR101 articles I linked to. The answers are all there.

In short, some of what you say is “fact” (with no evidence offered) has been proved otherwise. There are lots of studies, but I would challenge you to do just this one thing:

Go to ESPN (or any mainstream stats site of your choosing that provides archival stats), and look at who leads the league year-to-year in whatever “clutch” split stat you choose. If such an ability existed, why wouldn’t the same guys lead the league year-after-year? Take a look at the wild variation (relative to their overall stats – of course a great hitter can be expected to be great “in the clutch,” as well) in their “clutch” stats.

Over time, what you will see is that all hitters more or less regress to the mean level of production that they display as an overall hitter. What you see, in terms of the variation year-to-year in “clutch” stats, is really a product of the smaller sample sizes you see when you slice and dice a season into “split” stats.

As human beings, we have a tendency to remember the memorable, and disregard the rest. The guy who comes up big “in the clutch” is remembered that way even though there is plenty of contrary evidence that shows he isn’t any better – or worse – when the pressure is on than he is overall.

Now nobody has to ‘believe’ those assertions. This isn’t a faith-based site, although any Mariner fan is plenty used to praying by now. But if you go to the articles cited and read them — provided you’ve got enough stat background to follow along and really it’s not a lot of background — you will see the basis of what they’re saying and the soundness of the methodology. It’s not an opinion, but hard, cold, fact about variation in ability to hit, take a walk, etc. If you can bring additional data and higher level analysis to the table, you will be a star but in the meantime, the first step is to read the texts.