Damn Yankees by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview

Damn Yankees

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players who were at their best when all the chips were on the line.

The sabermetric guys have added some stats some find useful, such as those which conclude that home runs are more important than stolen bases, relegating previously top Ty Cobb to fifth position while installing babe Ruth as the clear best. This, in addition to highly weighting pitching performance, might make some sense, until you get no answer to how many home runs were hit with no one on late in the game while trailing 8-0. A similar question can be concocted regarding stolen bases. For a

pitcher, how many scoreless innings were posted after the game was already decided? No sabermetrician has offered a possible workable definition of clutch situation. On their side, some are quite obvious, yet others are often determinable only after the fact; i.e. someone hits a two run home run in the second inning of a game their team wins 2-1.

From SABR 2018: “The history of attempts to identify clutch hitting date back over 40 years. While the general sabermetric consensus is that clutch hitting does not exist as an identifiable and replicable skill, the topic remains controversial.” In other words, to their credit, they admit not

being able to quantify what might very well be the game’s most important aspect.