spira’s profile

If clutch hitters do exist in the major leagues (as opposed to clutch hitting, which exists by definition) 1) We have no way of identifying them 2) Their clutchness would have to be of little importance because we can't find it. It's impossible to improve that clutch hitters don't exist, but we can prove that we have no meaningful way of figuring out which hitters are clutch hitters if they do exist. So I really don't care. It's certainly legitimate to add the value of a hitter's clutch hitting when you measure his past performance, because hitting in the clutch can provide extra value (though, of course, some of that value is negated by inferior performances the rest of the time). You just can't reasonably consider clutch hitting as a special skill that player has that is different than his overall hitting. (None of that applies to clutch pitching, by the way, which I'm not really sure about. And i would be extremely surprised if clutch fielding did not exist; I think it more or less has to.) The worst thing about talking clutch hitting though is that it has become a way of announcers telling the audience "Well, this players stats aren't very good, but i like him a lot, so he must be a clutch player." Clutch is used to express personal likes and dislikes. Since it's not easy to measure, announcers feel safe in saying whatever they want about the clutch hitting abilities of a batter. Greg

posted at 01:22 AM on July 10

Wasn't any more interesting a study than when I first read about it 3 years ago...... Phil Birnbaum recently did a round-up of clutch hitting studies on his blog, including one new one that was presented a couple of weeks ago.

posted at 02:47 AM on July 08

Aside from errors, the formula doesn't really count fielding, so the formula wouldn't have any reason to rate Young negatively. No one takes this formula seriously except the media, and they only do that for one day a year. It's a formula designed by bureaucrats for bureaucratic purposes. It isn't really even an attempt to measure player value.

posted at 10:24 PM on November 01

Whoa.. NFL teams are cheating? I would never have guessed! Every single week players on the field try and cheat by committing penalties without being seen. We all know what happens in every pile on after a fumble - hidden from view, players do everything they can, including things that violate the rules, to try and end up with the ball. What Belichick did is equivalent. He got caught and deserves the punishment. But this talk of Belichick somehow damaging the integrity of the NFL is inane. If he has hurt the reputation of the NFL, he has hurt it by getting caught cheating, not by the cheating itself. Most fans know that cheating is rampant, but they prefer not to hear about it so they can ignore it. The fact that drug use has been prevalent in NFL and MLB for the last 50 years or so has never been a secret, but fans were okay with that as long as they didn't know the specifics. This is not true in all sports, of course. In sports like golf and tennis, cheating is truly frowned upon. But baseball and football aren't like that. Vince Lombardi once said (though he wasn't the first to say it) that "Winning isn't everything; it's the only thing." He was later somewhat embarrassed that he said this, but he meant it. While he didn't want his team to kill to win, he wasn't about to tell his team that fair play was more important than winning

posted at 02:16 PM on September 19

grad - There have been very few ballplayers over the last 50 years who haven't used any type of illegal performance enhancer. The only player of the last 50 years I'm convinced never used anything illegal is Tony Gwynn. I haven't heard of anybody else who clearly went out of his way to avoid any substance in the clubhouse that might be "loaded."

posted at 09:30 AM on August 09

Aaron was a truly great home run hitter his entire career. The reason he snuck up on people when he broke the record was that he had played the first park of his career in a home ball park that suppressed home runs, and then moved to the Launching Pad for the second half of his career, a stadium which boosted his home runs. Here are his home runs on the road year-by-year: 1954 12 1955 13 1956 11 1957 26 1958 20 1959 19 1960 19 1961 15 1962 27 1963 25 1964 13 1965 13 1966 23 1967 16 1968 12 1969 23 1970 15 1971 16 1972 15 1973 16 1974 9 1975 8 1976 4 Aaron had one significant weakness compared to the other all-time great hitters of his time; he didn't get on base nearly as much as Mays or Mantle or Frank Robinson. But as a home run hitter, Aaron never was second best.

posted at 09:18 AM on August 09

As far as Ryan goes, it's well known in baseball circles that he was cheating big-time during the last portion of his career with Texas. He was throwing spitters and other such things; that's how Ryan had his best seasons rate wise in his late thirties and early forties. The media never brings this up, however, because Ryan is such an icon. I think it's also safe to say that Ryan, like virtually everyone else in baseball in the sixties through nineties, was using stuff a lot more powerful and less legal than the Motrin he was endorsing in commercials to keep going. Ryan had truly bad control for most of his career, leading the majors in walks year after year. a problem that prevented him from being one of the top pitchers in baseball on the level of Seaver, Carlton, Palmer, etc. During those last years in Texas, though, he was able to get hitters to swing at his spitters and thus walked a lot fewer people per inning than he had during the earlier part of his career.

posted at 08:58 AM on August 09

CBS' Public Eye column also think it reads like something from the Onion.

posted at 10:24 AM on August 07

Well, no. Even this article doesn't agree, as it gives Boras a lot of credit for bringing in Dorfman to work with his clients. The reality is that there are lots of players who work with coaches that are not on the team. Sometimes these coaches help players, sometimes they don't. If these specific coaches are doing what the author thinks - changing the approach of these players from one the one that made them successful to something else, then it's probably a bad idea. Obviously, this isn't something that happens to every Boras client. And Boras almost certainly pays his coaches more than major league clubs do, so he can probably hire better coaches. The problem here is a more specific one, involving specific coaches and specific players. Now, if Boras and his coaches think that they always know best, that they should be the ones who determine the approach of every player that Boras represents, then that would be a big problem. But I don't see any evidence that that's the case. Boras may indeed "care too much" about his clients and "overeducate" them, but the solution to that is to practice more restraint and not try and fix things that aren't broken, not to dissolve. Most players would be very lucky to have the (non-financial) resources that Boras provides his clients.

posted at 01:08 PM on July 21

Too bad Eric Plunk isn't around anymore to deliver the record-breaking pitch.

posted at 12:38 PM on July 21

Newbie - I doubt that any major league club has ever put radar speed numbers in a spreadsheet, at least not as data. It's much more likely that teams will start using the numbers they now have measuring the movement of pitches into a spreadsheet.

posted at 12:55 PM on July 18

The important thing is not the speed with which a pitcher throws, but the speed at which the ball appears to come at the batter. At some point, I assume we will be able to measure that speed with the use of cameras focusing on hitters eyes.

posted at 01:34 PM on July 17

Ichiro has certainly been a great player this year. but he's only had one other full season during which he hit as well - 2004. His value depends highly on his batting average, so when he hits .350, he's great. When he doesn't come close, as in 2003 and 2005, though, his value is pretty close to that of an major league average outfielder. They key for him is to avoid hitting fly balls; his worst seasons tend to come, not coincidentally, when he hits the most home runs. While obviously power is by far his most significant weakness, it's clearly one he should ignore. (Unless, of course, he can hit lots of inside-the-park home runs.) Unfortunately, he doesn't seem to be doing as good a job at that as he has in his best seasons, so I expect his batting average to sink somewhat in the second half, by at least 20 points. He'll still end up with the 2nd or 3rd best season of his career, though. He's fairly obviously both overrated and underrated because of his unusual (for mlb today) set of skills. He's not just a plain singles hitter, but because of his lack of power, he simply can't be nearly as valuable offensively as players who get on base 40% of the time and hit for lots of power. His plus defense at a position in the middle of the defensive spectrum is a significant positive, of course, but it's not like he's a shortstop or catcher. So far this year, based on his hitting, baserunning, and defense, he's been somewhere around the 15th best player in the game (Top 10 so far this year: Magglio Ordonez, ARod, Bonds, Chipper Jones, Carlos Guillen, Victor Martinez, Posada, Miguel Cabrera, Hanley Ramirez and Chase Utley). In a season like 2003 or 2005, he's more like the 100th best player in the game. So his value lies somewhere inbetween.

posted at 10:38 AM on July 12

More regular season games abroad? Think season ticket-holders are going to be happy about a home game being held in, say, Tokyo, instead of their home stadium? Nerfball - The NFL hopes to institute a 17th game in its regular season schedule, and that game would be played abroad.

posted at 09:02 PM on June 29

I believe the steroids Galvin used came from the testosterone of goats, not monkeys. Or so said the newspaper reports of the time. I doubt Galvin was the first baseball player to use the stuff, however. As long as there is competition, there are performance enhancing drugs. That goes back to the ancient Greek Olympics.

posted at 08:58 PM on June 29