[Syd Thrift]

Again, as the "lone defender" here for whatever reason, what I'm saying does not really disagree with the BP article and frankly all this "hur dur did you read the article????" crap sounds a lot like the sabermetric equivalent of smug atheists standing outside of churches and offering to debate Christians or something (disclaimer: I am an atheist and I'm also smug, just not to the point that I'm gonna pee other peoples' cornflakes). Look. I agree that by the metrics we have available, clutch doesn't seem to be an ability that looks any different from random chance. Hell, the only reason I'm pushing this right now is the smugness assumes that the issue is closed in ways that it's just plain not closed. I'll put this out in numerical format:

1. "Clutch" exists in other sports. Maybe it doesn't exist in the "there are mental differences between players that we can quantify" way but that was never my argument in the first place. My argument is that certain skillsets might make some players do better in certain high-leverage situations, similar to how you can't rely on post players in the NBA to convert opportunities with less than 3 seconds remaining on the shot clock.

2. The BP article straight up doesn't address this because they know and I know that there isn't enough data yet. If/when there is, I expect that the evidence for "clutch" in baseball will read something like "most of the time that you see 95+ mph fastballs is when you're down in the 9th inning by 1-3 runs and as such hitters who can get around on fastballs of that speed will have a 10-20 point wOBA boost". I doubt we'll ever find, like, mental evidence because if there was it probably would have shown itself by now. It also may come out that there is no special ability there. We just don't have enough of *that* kind of data. The number of triples that Ty Cobb hit in 1911 have nothing to do with that. There are new stats that have just entered into baseball within the last few years that will help us shed light on this stuff. And again, the light shed might very well be "nope, still no boost to certain types of hitters in pressure situations" and I'm perfectly willing to accept that.

3. Whether or not "clutch" exists as a skill, there absolutely *have* been clutch performances. Kirk Gibson's walk-off homerun with a broken leg off of Dennis Eckersley in the 1988 World Series immediately pops to mind. Is it replicatable? No. Is it something we should think of as some kind of special skill? Probably not. Was it a clutch at-bat? Hell yes it was a clutch at bat. Let's not allow our pedantry about statistics to get in the way of actual things that happen in actual games.