Luck of the draw, baby
It’s the bottom of the ninth inning. There are two outs. There is a runner on second base and a runner on third base. The batter steps to the plate, his team down two runs. A single scores one at minimum, and most likely two. No productive outs are available.
This is the proverbial clutch moment, a high-leverage moment. Intuition says that, all things being equal, a good hitter is a better choice than a bad hitter in this situation. Intuition also says that, all things being equal, some players are better at managing the intense pressure than other players—these players, they say, are “clutch hitters.” On a team level, you could call it “clutch hitting.”
Last year, the Kansas City Royals were excellent at clutch hitting. When the bases were empty, the team had a .226 batting average and a .665 on base plus slugging percentage. But when there were runners in scoring position, the team had a .282 average and a .794 OPS. They were excellent at converting opportunities to runs.
This year, well, there’s a totally different story. The Royals currently have a .203 average and a .570 OPS with the bases empty, which is already terrible. But when there are runners in scoring position, the team has been, somehow, even worse—to the tune of a .211 average and a .557 OPS.
A further look into the splits is not pretty, especially for some very common and particularly high-leverage scenarios. With runners on first base and second base, the Royals have a .387 OPS in 59 plate appearances. With zero outs and a runner on first, the Royals have a .388 OPS in 37 PAs. And with the bases loaded, the Royals have a .397 OPS in 19 PAs. Considering that the team ranks dead last in home runs hit, those figures need to be better.
But the Royals have run back most of the offense from last year, so you’d expect the team to be better moving forward, right?
Uh, right?
Not so fast.
Ok, sure, you can technically expect them to be better. We are still working with small sample sizes, for one, and it will stabilize upward. For instance, the 2024 Chicago White Sox were an abomination, but that abomination still managed a .604 OPS with runners in scoring position—the Royals are better than that. Additionally, the Royals have already started their yearly process of replacing guys who shouldn’t have been starters in the first place with better players, which should raise the team’s offensive floor.
But the big reason why you specifically can’t expect them to be as good as they were last year is because clutch hitting isn’t a thing, and it’s nearly entirely due to variance and small sample size. The 2024 Royals weren’t full of clutch hitters. They had a good clutch hitting result. However, it tells us nothing about this year, and we can’t infer anything from it.
Baseball players generally get defensive when confronted with the idea that clutch hitting is not a predictable skill, because intuitively it seems like some players would be better under pressure than others. You can find all sorts of really old reasoning why clutch hitting isn’t real from a long time ago, like this article from 1977 and this one from 1987. Beyond the stats, my favorite quote about it is from the 1984 Bill James baseball abstract:
How is it that a player who possesses the reflexes and the batting stroke and the knowledge and the experience to be a .260 hitter in other circumstances magically becomes a .300 hitter when the game is on the line? How does that happen? What is the process? What are the effects? Until we can answer those questions, I see little point in talking about clutch ability.
If players are better in certain circumstances, they should also have the ability to be better in all circumstances. It makes no sense that a player would suddenly become better if they had the ability to do that all the time. It’s giving “just make the entire plane out of black box material!”
Now, one of the reasons why this doesn’t seem intuitive to so many is because I think clutch performance is a skill—it’s just a skill that every baseball player has. When you are good enough to play Major League Baseball, there are certain weaknesses that get weed people out along the way. If you aren’t good at tuning out the noise and locking in during important moments, you don’t get far enough to become a professional ballplayer at all. And so, since everyone has that skill, the fact that some players may be better than others at it, even at the highest levels, isn’t the biggest determining factor.
This, then, takes us full circle to the initial hypothetical. If a good hitter comes to the plate in a key moment, you feel good at your chances. But if a poor hitter comes to the plate in a key moment, you are hoping he can come through. Kansas City’s main offensive strategy this year is to hope that a bunch of hitters who struggle to get on base can avoid outs. It may work out that way. But it may not. It’s all about baseline performance. Clutch is just hope.