What I’ve Learned So Far

Joe Posnanski’s thoughts on “clutch” hitting in this blog post got me thinking about that topic again. I believe the topic has ramifications far beyond sports. So here’s my take, which I’ve developed in conversation with smart baseball friends over the years.

The dumb way to look at, say, Jeff Bagwell’s postseason batting line is to say, “He choked in the playoffs.” Baseball writers Joe Sheehan and Gary Huckabay, among others, have rightly ridiculed this version of the “choker” argument, pointing out how silly it is to ascribe some sort of grand failure of character to a player because his performance in the postseason doesn’t look so great. This is doubly true when you consider that most big players, of any sport, don’t get very many bites at the playoff apple, whether that means at-bats in the baseball postseason or sets of tennis in the Wimbledon final.

As leading lights of Baseball Prospectus, Sheehan and Huckabay are firmly in the sabermetric camp of baseball analysis, which tends to shun folk theories of sports performance in favor of actual analysis based on accurate observation. (It’s a myth, by the way, that these folks are all driven by numbers-numbers-numbers; the ones I know are driven by a love of baseball and a desire to know — not guess or assume — what makes baseball tick.) What sabermetricians have discovered is that there is no workable definition of “clutch” hitting, in the sense that there is no good documentation of a major-league baseball player who performs better than his established level of play in tight situations (late innings, close games, etc.) or in the playoffs. Even playoff heroes like Derek Jeter, once you analyze their performances, are found to perform right around their established level of play. To put this another way, we know as a point of fact that Jeter’s playoff numbers (batting average, on-base percentage, fielding statistics, etc.) very closely mimic his lifetime numbers, without any spikes or major aberrations. Again, this isn’t even arguable — it’s a point of fact.

But the question remains: are there clutch hitters? Is it possible that a Derek Jeter or a Reggie Jackson or a George Brett somehow distributes his excellence differently in the playoffs? Many sabermetricians would point you right back to the previous answer and give a definitive No. Bill James, the godfather of sabermetrics, says Maybe — that is, that this may be one of the areas of the game that is not captured adequately by our numbers, or by our grasp of those numbers. Maybe George Brett did have something special that emerged when the going was toughest. It certainly seemed that way to those of us who watched him, and to those who watched Jeter command the stage in the playoffs during the Yankees’ long run of excellence. And it’s not like those three first-pitch homers that Jackson hit in his historic 1977 World Series game were figments of our collective imagination. By his own telling and from documentary proof, we know that Jackson imposed his will on that game. But we don’t know how.

In the blog piece referenced above, Posnanski talks about the opposite case as well, that is, the case of players who play worse when the going is toughest. I don’t think his argument is quite right, but I do think that he is mining what’s likely the most rewarding vein if we want to find out something useful about “clutchness” or its opposite.

Posnanski holds that big-leaguers, especially those who have been around for a long time, are acclimated to performing under extreme game stresses: late innings, close games, men on base, two outs, two strikes, tough pitchers, and so on. He holds that the players who can’t hack these stresses are the ones who stay in the minor leagues or drop out of the game altogether. And I’m sure that there are many players for whom this is true.

But what about Jeff Bagwell? What about Alex Rodriguez? These are two players whose names are often mentioned as playing below their own established levels when it counted the most in the playoffs. Yet no one has ever questioned whether they could hack the stresses of baseball. Of course they could (still can, in A-Rod’s case). The two of them have won many games with their bats, whether with home runs, big RBI hits with men on, two-out hits, or even by drawing a hair’s-breadth base on balls that tears a late inning open offensively.

Yet here’s something else inarguable: Jeff Bagwell’s line during 2150 regular-season games includes a .297 batting average (good), a .408 on-base percentage (wow), and a .540 slugging average (boom). That is the calling card of a Hall of Fame first baseman. But in 33 playoff games, he managed a .226 batting average (weak), a .354 on-base percentage (meh), and a .321 slugging average (outright terrible). You can say what you want about small sample size — it’s only 106 at-bats we’re talking about — and you can say what you want about how tough the pitching gets in the postseason. True and true . . . but Bagwell’s postseason averages aren’t just bad, they’re awful.

On top of that, plenty of knowledgeable baseball observers — including professional scouts — have talked about how some players visibly “press” in playoff at-bats. Living in Texas, I watched a fair amount of Bagwell’s games over the years, and I can tell you that he looked bad in many of his playoff at-bats. He looked visibly different, his swing was longer, and it seemed like he was trying to hit the ball 500 feet on every pitch. Posnanski mentions something similar for Rodriguez, who visibly changes his approach in postseason at-bats. To say this does not equate to an accusation of “choking”; Sheehan and Huckabay are right to attack the sort of non-analysis that attacks players’ characters when those players don’t get a hit in a pinch. But without remotely questioning the competitive drive of Bagwell and Rodriguez, and without questioning their indisputable ability to hit out of jams across the breadth of their playing careers, we can’t all just be imagining those bad playoff at-bats.

In fact, it’s not an issue of character at all, but an issue of neurology — or, if you like, of human nature. For whatever reasons (and neurologists themselves don’t pretend to understand them all), different people respond to stressors in different ways. This is obvious from even the mildest anecdotal study of human nature, but many specifics of these phenomena have been documented by brain scientists. Among the things they’ve found out is that under certain kinds of stress, some athletes undergo neurophysical reactions that tend to erode their athletic performance. A famous example of this used to be Amelie Mauresmo, who never played up to her sky-high tennis abilities (or world ranking) in the closing rounds of Grand Slam tournaments. And you could see her tightening up, as though she was thinking about the mechanics of every shot as she was trying to complete it. There’s a reason that so many athletes will say, “I wasn’t thinking about anything, I just saw it and was able to put a good swing on it”; they say this because their conditioning and habituation are operating at such a high level that they’re not getting in their own way with extraneous rational thoughts. They’re just playing the game. It was only when Mauresmo finally was able to just play without overthinking that she got the monkey off her back in Grand Slams. It took a lot of doing.

I think Joe’s position that big-leagers are attuned to stress by countless late-and-close situations fails to account for the different emphasis that some players put, consciously or unconsciously, on the playoffs. Mauresmo was already a superb tennis player, but because of the stress she (unwittingly) put upon herself, she would lose even to lesser players when she got close to a Grand Slam title. Another apt example: In golf, Greg Norman won many titles. One of his two British Open wins is regarded as one of the greatest golfing performances ever because he managed it in such adverse weather conditions, and against a field stocked with terrific players. But he’s much more famous for his collapse at the 1996 Masters, when he gave away a huge lead — there’s no other way to say it — to Nick Faldo on the last day.

Greg Norman’s not just a man’s man — he’s more man than Ricardo Montalban. The guy flies helicopters, he manages businesses, he’s a tremendous athlete, and he won tons of titles. But for whatever set of reasons, on that day, with too big a lead, at the freaking Masters, he couldn’t manage the stress. Not the generalized playing stress that Posnanski talks about, mind you, but THAT very specific stress. The world watched him take three times as long to set up every shot. He was trying to be slow and deliberate, but it had the effect of letting him overthink shots. I remember watching that round on t.v. as it happened; he clearly — visibly, physically — looked out of sorts. He didn’t suffer a collapse of character. He didn’t “choke”, if that’s supposed to imply that he’s not a real man who can’t take pressure or whatever. But he did get in his own way — tripped all over his own feet — on what should have been the crowning day of his career. On that day, on that stage, the acid bath got to him.

I think the same thing happened to Bagwell during his playoff career. I think it’s still happening to Rodriguez. For whatever unknown reasons, something changes for these normally strong-minded performers when they get into the playoffs — the same way that something changed for Mauresmo and Norman. They didn’t become “weak”; they didn’t fail to man up or whatever; but something changed in their heads, and the results showed in their body language and in their performances.

Conversely, for whatever unknown reasons, Jeter and Brett and Jackson could bring their overall tolerance for stress from the regular season to the playoffs. I believe George Brett would have hit doubles, down two strikes to Sandy Koufax in his prime, playing underwater. Reggie Jackson could have homered off of anybody’s best pitch if the fate of the earth hung in the balance. I don’t know why, but those guys were — most of the time, anyway — acid-proof.

So, to sum up, here’s what I think happens:

1. — Despite the commonly held folk wisdom about “clutchness”, NOBODY plays substantially ABOVE their established level in the playoffs or in tight situations. NOBODY . . . EVER. It doesn’t occur.

2. — Despite the general sabermetric denial that any such thing as “clutchness” exists — and notwithstanding the assertion of point #1 — SOME players, for reasons we can’t fully suss out, DO succumb to stressors during CERTAIN situations, whether it’s the baseball playoffs or the final at Roland Garros or Sunday at Augusta. They fall victim to the neurological acid bath.

3. — Because #2 afflicts lots of fine athletes, we tend to ascribe the fictional special quality of “clutchness” to the players who don’t succumb. Ergo Reggie Jackson and Larry Bird and Roger Federer and Tiger Woods seem inhumanly “clutch”, when in fact they simply display a still ill-understood neurological immunity to changing their approach — that is, they don’t stumble over their own feet — when the stakes are raised.

I’d love somebody to critique this. Takers?

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 21st, 2007 at 9:13 am and is filed under Excellence, Sports.