skyking162

I’m certainly not a big believer in repeatable clutch skill, but there are certainly players who end up performing better in important situations. If you enjoy perusing clutch stats, check out Baseball-Reference’s new clutch splits. For example, David Ortiz.

There are two sections to look at. The first is titled “Clutch Stats” and breaks down performance by score differential (tied and within 1, 2, 3, or 4 runs), plus “close and late” and 2-out RISP. The second is titled Leverage and breaks down performance into one of three leverage index categories, courtesy of Tom Tango’s work.

To me, the most useful column of these splits is tOPS+ which compares each player’s performance in each split to his overall performance. For example, David Ortiz’s tOPS+ in high-leverage situations throughout his career is 112, meaning he’s performed 12% better when the leverage index is 1.5 or greater. Interestingly, his low-leverage tOPS+ is 99 and his mid-leverage tOPS+ is 94. Evidently Big Papi just can’t focus when the game is reasonably competitive.

Also, take a look at Ortiz’s tOPS+ by score differential. Do you spy a pattern? Better yet, does it mean anything?

Diff    tOPS+
tied    119
w/in 1  108
w/in 2  107
w/in 3  106
w/in 4  102
 >4     87

And don’t forget about Fangraph’s WPA leaderboard.

Addendum: Here’s a better use of the new split data, one that doesn’t ask whether a player is clutch or not — Ichiro steal when it matters.

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