Quote:
Originally Posted by RonCo
All good statisticians are careful to point out the they cannot prove a negative. So reputable studies about clutch hitting can only say "we can't find it." For me, that's good enough to say it should not be modeled in a game.
It's much like catcher defense. The Bill James's of the world worked hard to see what kind of impact catchers had on defense for many years, and basically said "we can't find any--or at least not any that really differentiate between catchers." It took advanced work on framing to really find anything. Time moves on. If clutch hitting actually exists, there will be a way to quantify it.
Until then, argue all you want.  |
You know that there *is* statistical evidence for pitch framing making a difference, right? Based on evidence that we didn't have available to us before about a decade ago? It's not huge, and since teams realized that it is indeed a thing and not another Baseball Truth it's mostly gone away, but if that's your parallel, I'm all for it.
Again, this isn't about proving a negative. This is about exciting new evidence that will get us closer to truths about the game. And I don't blame you for not reading the first couple pages of this but I for one am not and have not been arguing that clutch is about mental fortitude or whatever. If it exists, it probably exists the same way clutch exists in basketball: certain profiles do better than others in pressure situations. Maybe you'd expect that to show up in the old fashioned stats but maybe it will turn out to be that, say, fastball hitters will otherwise outplay other types of hitters in those situations, all else being equal.
Or it might not. As a skeptic, I'm going to roll with the evidence wherever it lies. I'm not going to sit there and defend the orthodoxy against the unenlightened hordes because that's not really what skepticism is about, and quite frankly that's what led many in the movement to deny climate change. You get into that mindset that it's all about orthodoxy, it's a very small step to going out and finding orthodoxies that fit in with your own opinions rather than accepting the often ephemeral nature of established science.