[Syd Thrift]

Okay, but this is the thing: what you call "luck" is short for "a lot of processes that we can't quantify or control for". When you roll dice in a game of craps, there are all kinds of factors that cause the dice to tumble: how much spin and force you throw the dice with, the part of the table you throw them against, even a stray wind current. We don't have the kind of fine motor skills to ever really control the first part of that so it's essentially a random process.

The thing is, baseball stats aren't *really* random. We can call them luck because we're not so great at quantifying everything that goes into producing a single or a double or what have you, but pitchers do not randomly choose which pitches to throw, hitters do not randomly choose what to hit, fielders do not randomly choose which balls to dive at and which ones to avoid, etc. There is this whole new layer of analysis that we are just now, as in within the past 3 or 4 years, finding ourselves able to dive into given pitchFX and batted ball statistics.

We straight up do *not* have all of the answers here and it's quite frankly arrogant to think that we do. And it may be that with the tip-of-the-iceberg data we have now, we've already reached the same conclusion we were going to reach regarding "clutch" anyway: that it's not a quantifiable skill (we *really* need to stop saying "clutch doesn't exist" because it's a stupid and anti-experiential thing to say. Of course clutch performances exist. You can say Kirk Gibson was just super lucky until you're blue in the face but that's not going to make it not a clutch performance*. What it isn't is, to the best of our knowledge, a repeatable performance). But this isn't a situation where, necessarily, people are even saying "you can't prove that it doesn't exist!". This is a situation where our ignorance of the game on an analytical basis is becoming more and more apparent, and where we probably need to re-evaluate this, as well as many other baseball maxims, once we've got enough data.

*And for that performance in particular I have my doubts. Isn't it possible that Gibson saw something Dennis Eckersley was doing that led him to lobby Tommy Lasorda to put him out there to pinch-hit, and that thing that he saw led directly to his hitting a homerun? This is "luck" in the sense that it's very hard to, given the current state of our knowledge of the game, impossible to quantify, but that doesn't mean that Kirk Gibson rolled some dice and came up snake eyes necessarily.