Beyond the Box Score: Morong: How Many Games Do Clutch Hitters Really Win?

CLOPS CLOPS CLOPS…Morong’s continuing search for the Holy Grail of clutch hitting.

This might seem like an easy question to answer. Just check how many times a player drove in the winning run in his team’s last AB (like David Ortiz, who seems to do it regularly). But very quickly problems arise. What about the guy who got on base and who scored the winning run? Should he get part of the credit? And what about times when a player fails to get a hit that would have won a game? Should that count as some kind of loss or be subtracted from the games he did win? None of these concerns even deal with whether or not players really can hit better than they normally do when the game is on the line. But I assume, for the sake of argument, that whatever difference in performance in the clutch that we find for players is real. Then I estimate how many wins (or losses) this brings to his team.