[Syd Thrift]

So, I would really like to see someone perform that BP study on a single OOTP universe. You don't get to run Monte Carlo-style simulations, you don't get to expand the schedule to 300 games a year, you don't even get to count late-inning stats from the 1880s, you just get the same body of data to try and determine whether or not clutch exists. Intuitively, people who don't remember Markus' conversation don't think it exists in the game, which I find a bit funny but also a bit interesting. It may be that folks just assume that the game will operate the same way they think real baseball operates (i.e. without clutch) and so their intuitions are colored by it, but it may also be that they're not intuitively seeing it the same way they don't see it express itself in real-world data.

I think it would be an interesting way to go, not because it would in any way prove that clutch exists in the real world, merely that the contrasting hypothesis that clutch exists and the fact that it's hard to impossible to see evidence for it with basic statistics can co-exist. Or there may be a marked difference you *can* actually see from player to player or observable player type to player type. Or Markus said he'd add clutch but then removed it when people raised a stink over it (which I don't think he ever said he did; what he said IIRC when people raised said stink - I think RonCo may have been one of the people who did so - was that the effect was small).