Monday Morning Mets Newsstand

by Eric Simon on Jul 23, 2007 10:47 AM EDT in Applesauce

Tim Marchman continues to amaze and impress me, showing an understanding of baseball and baseball fans that I thought impossible among local sports pundits. Take today's column on the Mets (lack of) clutch hitting this season for instance. Marchman could very easily fall prey to the crutches of tired clichés and conventional baseball whosifudge. Instead, he gives us this:

A perfectly rational person, fully aware that performance in the clutch has nothing to do with character and that it has more than a bit to do with luck, will still be driven to throw heavy objects when his team's lineup, from the top to the bottom, performs feats of wonder of the kind the Mets have this season.

and this:

All of this may be so, but it's still important not to mistake what is essentially an aesthetic complaint for a grave problem. Over time, nearly without exception, how well a team performs in the clutch is a function of how well its players do, and the players' performance is just a function of how good they are. The teamwide funk, no matter how real it seems, is an illusion -- prosaic as it is, the truth is that the Mets' problems are not the result of their mysterious clutch woes, but rather of a few key positions being manned by armies of green rookies and undead minor league veterans for long stretches of the year.

Emphasis is mine. Making other local writers look like dogshit by comparison? That's all Marchman.

At SNY.tv, Marc Raimondi has a nice profile of Howard Johnson.

Moises Alou should be back in the lineup on Tuesday against the Pirates. He claims to be a little sore from taking some bad swings and a little rusty from being on the shelf for so long, but he is itching to go.

Billy Wagner made the decision yesterday to intentionally walk Jeff Kent with a runner on second and one out in the bottom of the tenth. I guess it worked out, as Wags fanned Matt Kemp and Nomar Garciaparra to end the game.

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Comments

Good move by Wagner

Considering that the mustachioed asshole generally kills the Mets in situations like that.

a 4-3 road trip against a pair of good teams was most excellent, especially getting back up from a bad loss on Saturday and rallying for the victory yesterday.

Pittsburgh and Washington at home. Unfortunatley, both Ian Snell and Tom Gorzelanny go against the Mets, so the Pittsburgh series won't be a complete cakewalk, but I'd love to see 5 of 6 this week against the dregs of the NL.

Free Ramon Castro!

by Greenpoint Ian on Jul 23, 2007 12:02 PM EDT reply actions

i can't wait

until the majority of baseball fans realize that "clutch" doesn't really exist in baseball

by gogomets on Jul 23, 2007 3:07 PM EDT reply actions

Amen...

...the depth and intrigue that baseball brings (in my opinion) is vastly more interesting than most of the crap out there with "pundits" and age old myths.

Kent

by kmdarcy @ Amazin' Avenue on Jul 23, 2007 8:26 PM EDT up reply actions

Joe Morgan's Assessment

I haven't seen Tim Marchman write enough to know how good he will be. The key is whether or not he'll be consistent. So far he has been, but it's too early to tell. He'll either be a good writer or he won't be.

by ams258 on Jul 23, 2007 3:27 PM EDT reply actions

If there is no such thing as clutch hitting...

...and all such stats (e.g., BA w/RISP) revert to the particular hitter's mean in the long run, does this raise the possibility that the Mets may "inexplicably" become good clutch hitters down the stretch? Or is the sample size still too small to anticipate this?

by madisonmetsfan on Jul 23, 2007 3:32 PM EDT reply actions

To the mean and beyond..

This is what I've been thinking all year for Beltran and Delgado. The longer they keep sucking, the hotter they'll get at some point to get their numbers in line with career averages.

Let's hope it works with RISP as well.

by whynot on Jul 23, 2007 3:43 PM EDT up reply actions

Well not really

Beltran and Delgado won't be "due" to rebound from poor performances earlier in the season. They're most likely to hit for their career numbers from this point in the season, regardless of how they've performed earlier.
After all, if you flip a coin 10 times and heads comes up on 8 of them, the next 10 flips aren't likely to have 8 tails to cancel out the earlier flips. They're likely to result in 5 tails and 5 heads. In a small number of flips it's possible to have a large percentage of heads or a large percentage of tails, but if you look at a distribution of thousands of coin flips there should be 50 percent heads and 50 percent tails because the skewed results of a small number of flips get lost in the shuffle of the many flips.
The same principle applies to Delgado and Beltran - they have a decent chance of getting very hot or very cold over a short period of time, but a hot streak isn't due to be followed by a cold streak or vice versa. Instead any of those streaks will get lost in their final numbers, which are a much larger sample size and are likely to resemble their career numbers.

by ams258 on Jul 23, 2007 3:57 PM EDT up reply actions

Due

Beltran isn't due for a stretch of good clutch hitting any more than a coin flip of "heads" is due following ten straight flips of "tails". Over a large enough sample, the laws of probability tell us that the frequency of a coin landing on "heads" will approach 50%. Likewise, the performance of one player in "clutch" situations (or any situation) will approach his performance in all situations over a large enough sample.

There are always external factors at work, and a single baseball season isn't nearly long enough to drown out all statistical noise (e.g. those ten consecutive "tails" coin flips). It's entirely possible that over 162 games these players will experience more downs than ups. This is why you get outlier seasons (like Brady Anderson's monster 1996), and why good teams sometimes beat better teams in short series. It's also what makes baseball so dramatic, enjoyable and, at times, heartbreaking.

Numbers can tell us a lot. In many cases they tell us more than our eyes ever could. But they mostly tell us what has already happened in an effort to predict what is *likely* to happen, not what *will* happen. The difference between those two things is precisely why they play the games.

by Eric Simon on Jul 23, 2007 4:38 PM EDT up reply actions

Agreed, but.

Even a return to the norm (say, .280 BA w/RISP) for the rest of the season would be a major improvement for many of these guys.

by madisonmetsfan on Jul 23, 2007 7:29 PM EDT up reply actions

No Question

If some of these guys could just hit with RISP as they do in all other situations for the last couple of months the Mets will be in great shape.

by Eric Simon on Jul 23, 2007 8:03 PM EDT up reply actions

Damn...

...good stuff. As I just wrote, baseball to me is MUCH more interesting when taking such factors into the game (the equations). I don't read Marchman, but I appreciate what he's trying to do. And, by the responses by many on various Mets blogs, it seems that a large number of fans have no idea what he's talking about.

Kent

by kmdarcy @ Amazin' Avenue on Jul 23, 2007 8:29 PM EDT up reply actions

sometimes clutch hitting

cannot be measured statistically. Average with RISP is not a complete measure. What about sacrifice flies or moving a guy to third with less than two outs or drawing a lead-off walk to start the ninth inning in a close game.

Save America. Impeach Bush

by elifriedman on Jul 23, 2007 4:25 PM EDT reply actions

Sure it can

You can record and mathematically analyze sac flies, advancing a runner, or drawing a key walk, so all of those would be statistical measures of clutch ability.

I agree that there are aspects of baseball that can't be measured statistically, but it's clear that all statistical evidence supports the conclusion that there is no such thing as a clutch hitter. If you'd prefer to use other forms of evidence to determine that there is clutch hitting that's fine, but I'm curious as to what you would use to support that conclusion.

by ams258 on Jul 23, 2007 5:40 PM EDT up reply actions

Define

It really depends on your definition of clutch. Commonly accepted clutch "situations" include RISP, RISP with two outs, LIPS (Late Inning Pressure Situations, aka Close & Late), etc. Regardless of your criteria, you can absolutely quantify what a player has done in any given situation.

by Eric Simon on Jul 23, 2007 5:43 PM EDT up reply actions

Yes but

I'm a strong supporter of using statistics to analyze baseball, but some attempts to quantify a player's contribution have been pretty weak. Most SABR enthusiasts will admit that defensive metrics aren't that reliable, so we don't really have a good measure of a player's defensive ability in the clutch, for instance.

by ams258 on Jul 23, 2007 9:43 PM EDT up reply actions