According to most studies, baseball players who get a high percentage of clutch hits in one year do not duplicate the feat in subsequent years.  These studies conclude that baseball players hit in the clutch about as often as they hit in routine situations.  The conclusions reached about “clutch hitting” also apply in reverse: baseball players FAIL to hit in the clutch about as often as they fail to reach base in routine situations.  In other words, on the major league level  there are no “clutch” hitters, and no “chokers” either.

(Is there a proven ability to pitch in the clutch, or to be a clutch fielder or baserunner?  Most of the studies I’ve seen look at hitting, so that’s my focus here.  The only study I’ve seen on pitching is here, and this study concluded that clutch pitching is no more reproducible than clutch hitting.)

A few studies conclude that certain hitters are clutch, but that clutch hitting is statistically insignificant to wins and losses on the baseball field.  I know of only one study that thought clutch hitting was marginally important (worth up to 15 points in extra batting average; i.e. a .285 hitter in normal situations might hit .300 in clutch situations).  But the study reached strange conclusions about who is clutch and who is not.  Honestly.  If the study shows that Dave Collins was clutch and Reggie Jackson was a choker, how much faith can you have in the study?

(If you want to read everything you’d ever want to know about clutch hitting and sabermetrics, you can find it listed here.)

What are we Yankee fans to make of these studies?  Well, it’s possible (as Bill James has suggested) that clutch hitters do exist and that we just haven’t found a way to measure clutch statistically.  But the question of clutch hitting has been studied by sabermatricians for 30 years now.  This should be more than enough time for Bill James and his disciples to separate the clutch hitters from the rest of the pack.  Their failure to do so suggests that the players we call “clutch” are simply good baseball players who are lucky enough to deliver key hits at memorable times.

“Blink”

I’ve been thinking about the question of “clutch” and “choke” in connection with the book “Blink” by Malcolm Gladwell.   ‘Blink” examines the topic of “rapid cognition”, the kind of thoughts and judgments we reach  “in the blink of an eye” before we’re even aware that we ARE thinking.  We might call this cognition our “first impressions”, or “snap judgments”, or “gut reactions”.

According to Gladwell, our “blink” thoughts can be more accurate and show better judgment than the thoughts we come to later, after reflection and deliberation.  Gladwell describes many examples: the art expert who instantly senses that an authenticated piece of sculpture is a fake; or the tennis coach who can “feel” in advance (after the tennis ball is tossed and before it is struck) whether a player is about to double-fault.

Hitting a baseball is an example of where good “blink” thinking comes into play. A 95 mile per hour fastball takes 0.4 seconds to travel from the pitcher’s mound to home plate.  It takes a bit less than 0.1 seconds for the batter to get a visual fix on the pitched ball, and the batter must decide whether to swing when the ball is a bit more than half-way to the plate.  This means that a major-league hitter has around one-tenth of a second to decide whether or not to swing.  0.1 seconds leaves time only for “blink” thinking.

Some of Gladwell’s examples of blink thinking take place under pressure.  There’s the actor in an improv group who delivers the perfect line in a scene he’s never rehearsed.   There’s the fireman who senses that the floor of a burning building is about to collapse, and orders his men out of the building in the nick of time.  There’s the policeman who “knows” that a suspect is reaching inside his jacket for a wallet and not a handgun.  In each of these situations, there is no time for deliberation and nothing less than a “clutch” performance will do  – like when a Yankee batter tries to hit a 95 mile per hour fastball thrown from 60 feet away when a big game is on the line.

If we’re looking to understand “clutch” performances, Gladwell tells us to ignore the explanations offered by the clutch performers.  Gladwell cites the example of baseball great Ted Williams, one of the best pure hitters of all time.  Williams said that he could visually track a baseball from where it was thrown to where it made contact with his bat, but it is physiologically impossible for a hitter to see a baseball in the final few feet of its flight to home plate.  Williams is typical of successful blink thinkers: they can’t explain how they’re able to do what they do.  Blink thinking takes place in a level of our unconscious that we cannot access later for plausible explanations.

Despite our difficulty in explaining our “blink” judgments, Gladwell thinks it IS possible to improve our “blink” thinking.  The best “blink” thinkers are knowledgeable and experienced – the art expert who spots the fake sculpture is, after all, an “expert” who has evaluated the authenticity of many art objects.  The best blink thinkers focus on only a few factors most relevant to the situation – much like baseball players who “look for” a particular pitch (fast ball, slider) before the pitcher releases the ball.  Introspection seems to interfere with good blink thinking  –or  in the words of the Crash Davis character in “Bull Durham”, “don’t think, it can only hurt the ballclub.”

What else does “Blink” tell us about baseball?   Does “Blink” confirm that some baseball players are “clutch” and some are “chokers”?  Gladwell does not talk much about baseball, but he does discuss other pressure-packed activities.  One such activity is when a police officer fires a gun.

Despite what we might think from the movies and TV, most police officers go their entire careers without ever firing a gun at anyone.  When an officer DOES fire a gun at another person, it appears to be a highly stressful event, and most officers react to the shooting in unusual ways.  The officer may experience tunnel vision, but extreme visual clarity within the tunnel of his vision.  The officer’s hearing may shut down.  The officer may have a sense that time is slowing down.  Writes Gladwell:

“Our mind, faced with a life-threatening situation, drastically limits the range and amount of information that we have to deal with.  Sound and memory and broader social understanding are sacrificed in favor of heightened awareness of the threat directly in front of us.  In a critical sense, the police officers [involved in a shooting] performed better because their senses narrowed: that narrowing allowed them to focus on the threat in front of them.”

The officers described by Gladwell reacted to a pressure-packed situation by performing above their normal abilities.  Why shouldn’t athletes react to pressure in the same way?  Gladwell quotes basketball superstar Larry Bird, who used to say that at critical moments in a game, the court would go quiet and the players would seem to be moving in slow motion.  Bird’s observations are similar to those of the “clutch” police officers.

But few of us are Larry Bird.  Gladwell notes that under pressure, most people get too aroused.  With too much arousal, our senses  narrow past the point where we can make effective judgments.  Our tunnel vision becomes severe.  We can’t hear anything.  Our behavior grows crazy-aggressive.  Motor coordination deteriorates.

We “choke”.

If “clutch” and “choke” are integral to our blink thinking, then why can’t the sabermatricians measure which ballplayers are clutch and which are chokers?  Perhaps the answer is the one suggested years ago by Rob Neyer (sorry, I can’t find the cite) that choking baseball players might fail at lower levels (little league, high school, minor leagues) and never make it to major league baseball.  Perhaps it’s the case that very few situations on a baseball diamond have the emotional intensity of a police shooting.

Or perhaps it’s something simpler.  Perhaps in baseball, the top baseball players consistently perform at or near their best.   Perhaps the top baseball players do not allow themselves to achieve the level of arousal required for the hyper-focus described in “Blink”.  Perhaps the best baseball players keep their cool.

A Test Case: The Damon Double-Steal

Consider one of the great clutch Yankee performances in recent memory: the double-steal by Johnny Damon in the ninth inning of game 4 of the 2009 World Series.  For those who may not remember, let’s set the scene.  The Yankees were up 2 games to 1 against the Phillies, but had given up consecutive runs in the seventh and eighth innings of game 4, so the game was tied 4-4.  Momentum was on the side of the Phillies.  Phillies closer Brad Lidge looked dominant as he got pinch-hitter Hideki Matsui to pop out to shortstop and Derek Jeter to strike out swinging.  But Damon battled Lidge over nine pitches to get an opposite-field single, bringing Mark Teixeira to the plate.  Teixeira was batting lefty against the right-handed Lidge, and the Phillies put on a “shift”, positioning shortstop Jimmy Rollins to the right of second base and third baseman Pedro Feliz in the spot normally occupied by the shortstop.

On the first pitch to Teixeira, Damon took off to steal second base.  Feliz moved to second to take the throw from Phillies’ catcher Carlos Ruiz.  The throw was short – it bounced to Feliz in front and slightly to the right side of the bag, so Damon was easily safe at second and … no Philly was left in front of Damon.  Damon  took off for third base.  As Damon broke for third, he was just beyond the reach of Feliz – Feliz could not tag Damon where he stood, and Feliz was not fast enough to catch up to Damon once Damon started running.  Ruiz did not try to cover third base; Lidge tried but failed to get to third base before Damon.  The result was that Damon had managed to steal two bases on one pitch – a play that no one could remember seeing before.

With Damon on third, Lidge unraveled.  Lidge hit Teixeira with his third pitch, and allowed consecutive hits to A-Rod and Posada.   The Yanks scored three runs, taking game four and a commanding 3-1 Series lead.

Damon’s double-steal was one of the great clutch plays in baseball history, and we can analyze this play in the terms we’ve learned from “Blink”.  First, we understand that Damon’s decision to steal third base was a classic blink decision.  If Damon had deliberated for more than a moment, Feliz would have moved to the left side of second base and the opportunity to steal third would have been lost.

Next, we can examine the preparation that preceded Damon’s double-steal.  According to Damon, he’d been thinking about such a double-steal all year long.  Damon was also an experienced ballplayer – as a baserunner, he possessed the kind of expertise that Gladwell’s art critic had in spotting phony sculptures.  Damon knew, for example, that Feliz was not particularly fast.  Damon has put in the advance work necessary for a good blink decision.

With this in mind, we can reconstruct the moment when Damon took off for third base.  At the blink moment when Damon popped up from his slide into second base, Damon saw the situation — Feliz being just slightly out of reach, Lidge not moving to cover third, Ruiz not moving to cover third.  Being a good blink thinker, Damon did not deliberate.  He trusted his blink judgment and took off.

Now let’s reconsider Damon’s double-steal in light of what Gladwell wrote about arousal and hyper-focus.  Remember that before Damon stole third base, he had to steal second base.  Certainly his adrenaline was pumping as he took his lead off first base, anticipating the earliest opportunity when he could break for second.  He then had to race for second base at top speed, make a good slide into second, if necessary avoiding the fielder’s attempt to tag him out.  As Damon popped up from his slide, was he experiencing the kind of arousal described by Gladwell in his discussion of police officers?  If so, then Damon should have been hyper-focused on the steal of second, with little awareness of anything else.  But just the opposite was the case.  Damon was not tunnel-focused on second base; his field of vision also took in Feliz, Lidge, Ruiz and the unobstructed path between second base and third.  More important, Damon was able to “hear” and react to the blink “steal third” suggestion from his unconscious mind.

Upon analysis, Damon’s double-steal does not seem to arise from an aroused reaction like that of the police officers in “Blink”.  Damon’s double-steal seems more like the cool, unpressured blink judgments described by Gladwell in the rest of his book.  It appears that a clutch play like Damon’s double-steal is possible not because a baseball player rises to meet a pressure-packed situation, but because the player reacts to everything in a situation except for the pressure.

Maybe there are two kinds of clutch performance in sport: one where a player reacts to pressure, and the other where the player is unaffected by the pressure.  The first kind might be represented by a running back in the fourth quarter of the Super Bowl, who needs the extra will and strength to break a tackle for a first down.  The second kind might be represented by a golfer standing over a three-foot putt on the final hole of a big tournament, where the golfer’s object is to hit the putt the same way he’s hit (and made) thousands of similar putts in routine situations.

There is much about this that is beyond my understanding.  But my guess is that many baseball clutch performances are like Damon’s double-steal – they are made possible because the player is cool under pressure rather than being aroused by it.  Baseball is a fluid game, and a player that hyper-focuses on a single possibility may pass up other opportunities for a memorable performance.  In clichéd terms, clutch baseball players let the game come to them.

The sabermatricians look for extraordinary performances in clutch situations, and find statistical consistency instead.  Perhaps they have actually found what they are looking for and don’t realize it.  Perhaps the essence of “clutch” in baseball is consistency.

Or maybe “clutch” hitting is as mysterious as the “blink” thinking that makes clutch hitting possible.