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The Last Post About "The Clutch" I'll Ever WriteSeems like a lot of hoopla has been made by Pat and over at Bucs Dugout about the most recent Q&A, particularly Dejan Kovacevic's response to a comment touting Cota and his clutch hitting. Seems like Dejan is missing the point (which Charlie defines absolutely what that point is in his post) and also placating some readership in the process.As I mention in Pat's comments, I like the Q&A now. Maybe it's another relativity thing, but I think it has the tone of a fan. It almost reads more like a blog and less like a newspaper column, only this blogger has access to players, managers, and scouts. But when you talk as a fan, you say irrational things sometimes, you talk about how you feel about the player and not what his stats say. I like that about the column though, because I can figure out the stats on my own, it's the honest perspective of someone that has that access that I need help with. Charlie is a little more entailed, doing a triple backflip off the thirty meter platform into a pool of debate on whether clutch hitting is a skill. -- I'm sorry, are you guys upset that I used a diving reference in my Pirate blog? -- There is a couple things I have issue with here. What I find so confusing about Charlie's post is that for as much as it criticizes Dejan for hand-waving and not providing evidence supporting his argument, it does a lot of hand-waving and provides little evidence to support his argument. In fact I'm still not sure whether his argument primarily is that Dejan sucks or clutch isn't a skill. I also think he sounds slightly more enraged then he really was since the article disagreed with his opinion of Cota, although, personally, I thought Dejan downplayed Cota quite a bit, and certainly didn't hymn his praise a fraction as much as I do. Secondly, the post does much to criticize Kovacevic for the treatment of his readership. Truth be told, I take offense when someone tells me I'm not getting out to games or I'm paying too much attention to stats. But when that was written in the Q&A, it wasn't addressed to people like us. We are a group of people who eat, breathe, drink, and in my case, sleep Pirate baseball: so much so that we write or read weblogs about it. Last time I checked the city of Pittsburgh wasn't beating down the walls of PNC Park to get into a game. There is a whole mess of people whose only barometer of the team is what they catch on the late news (if they're up) or the box score they check when they're taking a dump the next morning. I know this first hand, I'm the youngest of eleven siblings, each one of them will claim to be a Pirate's fan; I guarantee only one of them knows who the last team we played was. Hell, before 1997 I had never seen more then 12 games a season because I didn't have cable, and before you ask, yes, these people have no restraint in sharing their opinions with someone they don't know. Are we so vain to assume that we are the only ones with an opinion worth emailing a sportswriter about. Remember when Meyer wrote the Q&A, half those questions seemed like they came from someone who hadn't watched baseball in six years. I'm certain Paul picked those on purpose so that he could sound intelligent everytime and never worry about being wrong. I think Dejan has done a great job of picking much more legitimate issues, but with that comes a risk: if you address something that divides people, those who disagree might not think to highly of you, but I don't think he writes like he feels superior to us. In fact, I suspect the "I know better than you" mentality pervades the Pirate blogisphere much more then it affects the Q&A. I know I've been guilty of it. For the record, I don't think clutch is a skill, but I do believe it's a trend. Players gaining a reputation for being clutch may play with more confidence and be more apt to continue being successful in such situations. Likewise, the converse can be true, and those trends can turn on a dime. Take Daryle Ward for example. He was certainly clutch late May after hitting two game winning home-runs in a week. For whatever reason those opportunities start coming in short supply and then suddenly it's a month later and you haven't hit any homeruns since then. Welcome to the other side my friend. If that sounds like piecing words together with little evidence to support it, it probably is. I have no definitive statistic on what clutch is, but I know what goes into to my thinking on whether or not a player is clutch. So you want a stat, I didn't go to engineering school for nothing: clutch coefficient = (clutch hits)^2 In addition to that, while I don't feel that being a clutch guy is something you can count on as a scoutable ability, I believe your performance in the clutch is. I find it hard to believe that after Tike Redman's bat on Friday some scout didn't write somewhere "swings defensively when game is on the line." Now I don't know this for a fact, and only someone with access to players, managers, and scouts could find that out. That in fact is my biggest complaint about Dejan's Q&A, how he didn't take advantage of that. However, I could have stated that in one paragraph (which I just did) instead of in drawn out and inflamatory post. So those are my thoughts on the skill of being clutch, but I could be wrong, very wrong. This argument only extends to hitting. Pitching is a different story. The entire concept of a closer is predicated on being clutch, of having a reputation as such, and performing at a level that makes fans, writers, and scouts think that pitching in the ninth inning is a skill that you are born with. Do I even need to hash out that argument. Just the presence of that little note merits to me almost any argument one might have about that extending to hitting. posted by Rory at 11:39 PM | |
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