Clutch hitter

A clutch hitter is a baseball player with a knack for coming up with the "big" hit. The big hit is typically a game-deciding hit, sometimes a home run, often coming with two outs, although it can be any hit or play with a significant impact late in a game. However, a clutch hit could come as early as the first inning. Being known as a clutch hitter is a position of high honor and responsibility, as the clutch hitter is recognized as the "go-to guy" for the team, and his exploits in pressure situations are celebrated by both fans and players alike.

Various baseball analysts, including Bill James, Pete Palmer, Dick Cramer, and the Baseball Prospectus editors, have found so-called "clutch hitting" ability to be a myth. This is not to say that clutch hits, like those listed above, do not exist, but rather that some kind of innate ability for a player to perform above his true talent level in high-pressure situations is nothing but an illusion. In his 1984 Baseball Abstract, James framed the problem with clutch hitting this way: "How is it that a player who possesses the reflexes and the batting stroke and the knowledge and the experience to be a .262 hitter in other circumstances magically becomes a .300 hitter when the game is on the line? How does that happen? What is the process? What are the effects? Until we can answer those questions, I see little point in talking about clutch ability."

Most studies on the matter involved comparing performance in the "clutch" category of statistics (production with runners in scoring position, performance late in close games, etc.) between seasons; if clutch hitting were an actual skill, it would follow that the same players would do well in the clutch statistics year in and year out (the correlation coefficient between players' performances over multiple seasons would be high). Cramer's study was the first of its kind, and it found that clutch hitting numbers between seasons for the same player varied wildly; in fact, the variance was the kind one would expect if the numbers had been selected randomly. Since Cramer published his results, many others have tried to find some evidence that clutch hitting is a skill, but almost every study has confirmed Cramer's initial findings: that "clutch hitting," in terms of certain players being able to "rise to the occasion" under pressure, is an illusion.

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Wikipedia