Ranking the New York Yankees in Late-Season Clutchness: 1-25
September 6, 2012 · Phil Watson · Jump to comments
Article Source: Bleacher Report - New York Yankees
September in a pennant race is traditionally a time when the best players on a team step up with their best performances.
So when considering how to rank the players most likely to be on a postseason roster, should the New York Yankees hang on and hold off the Baltimore Orioles and Tampa Bay Rays for the American League East crown or, at the very least, qualify for one of the two wild-card spots for the winner-take-all, single-game playoff opener, I tried to consider what a player has done in September and compare it to those same statistical categories over the course of their career.
There are many disputing theories about how to quantify a player’s so-called “clutchness.” In 2008, Eric Seidman of FanGraphs.com put forth the notion that a player’s clutch performance doesn’t so much relate to how a player performs with the game on the line, but rather how well he performs in those situations in comparison to his performance in all other situations.
Andrew Dolphin, who does runs the Dolphin Ratings at dolphinsim.com, did this piece in 2003 in which a statistical study he conducted found that clutch hitting does exist and it is important but that random effects make it difficult to determine how clutch a player is with a “high degree of accuracy.”
David Appelman wrote on the Baseball Analysts website that it’s important to remember that pitchers can be clutch performers, as well.
With all that in mind, I decided to put together a quick and dirty statistical performance metric of my own, which I am calling the Watson Clutch Performance Rating, or CPR. The acronym is apropos, I believe, because a player who chokes too often when the chips are down may find their career in need of that other type of CPR.
Because I was looking at the metric in the context of the September pennant race, I evaluated Yankee pitchers and hitters by comparing their career performance in September to their career totals in four categories. For hitters, those categories were batting average, on-base percentage, slugging percentage and at-bats per RBI. The pitchers were rated on ERA, WHIP, strikeout-to-walk ratio and opponents’ OPS.
A CPR rating of 1.000 indicates that the player’s September performance was identical to his career numbers. A rating below 1.000 show a player’s career numbers are better than his September performance and ratings above 1.000 show a player raises his performance in the final month of the season over the course of his career.
Here are my findings, in inverse order. It should be noted, also, that there are three omissions from this list of 25 players. Pitchers Cody Eppley and David Phelps have little to no major-league experience in September and pitcher Joba Chamberlain is, in my opinion, a very unlikely candidate to be on the postseason roster.
NOTE: All 2012 statistics through games of Tuesday, Sept. 4.
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