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Message: [QUOTE="SWC75, post: 1810955, member: 289"] In his 2000 Historical Baseball Abstract, Bill James rates JOE CARTER the 32nd best leftfielder in baseball history. He then spends the entire article on Carter trying to prove that Carter wasn’t as good a clutch hitter as his #3 man, Barry Bonds. He succeeds: Bonds hit fifty points better with men on base, 30 points with runners in scoring positon, 59 points better in the late innings of close games, 88 points higher with the bases loaded. And his OPS is 159 point higher in September. Carter has the higher league playoff batting average but only by .236-.200. Bonds had not at that point played in a World Series. Carter had done so twice for the Blue Jays and hit .277 with 3 doubles, 4 home runs, 12 RBIs and 8 runs scored in 11 games. At the end of the article, James concludes “I think it is hard to say that the record shows that Carter deserves any special credit as a clutch hitter”. Firstly, I’d never heard Joe Carter compared to Barry Bonds before. I haven’t heard anyone suggest that he was comparable. Carter hit .259 with 432 doubles and 396 home runs in his career. Pretty good totals, but not comparable to Bonds’ .298BA with 601 doubles and 762 home runs. If being as good as Barry Bonds is required to be a good clutch hitter, nobody is going to look “clutch”. And that was the intended point. Modern baseball stats are not designed to break down what happened in games so much as they are designed to imagine what players would have achieved in ideal, or at least similar circumstances. To do this the modern statistician prefers to look at rates rather than gross totals. And they tend to dismiss what I call “bottom line” numbers: essentially “runs produced”; in favor of what I call “contributory” numbers: essentially “bases produced”. They assume that activities of teammates and the nature of the ballpark or era are irrelevant in evaluating players and that looking at hits and walks is more important, assuming that teammates, ballparks and eras have less to do with those numbers. A special enemy is the idea of ‘clutch’ hitting: that when you do something is as important as how often you do it. That undermines analysis by rate and focuses on the end result. Thus it’s important for the stats guys to undermine any reputation as being a “clutch hitter”: you want the player’s achievements to be the result of his own general abilities and chance, not an increased ability in certain situations. And yet, if you watch games, it’s obvious that when you do something is as important as how often. If I tell you that one team had 10 hits and the other team had 5, you might assume that the team with 10 hits won the game, but not necessarily. And you’ve never heard a sports announcer give the “scores” and mention hits or walks. The above the line numbers are only important insofar as they contribute directly to the scoring of runs. If you produce more bases, you will generally produce more runs but that doesn’t help you win a specific game: you’ve got to come through when it counts. And Joe Carter came though plenty of times when it counted. He drove in 100 runs ten times, (and 98 another time).Mickey Mantle drove in 100 runs only four times in his storied career, playing for the Yankees. The only outstanding teams Carter played on were the Blue Jays’ 1992-1993 champions, before the big offensive explosion. He hit two doubles in the 6th and final game of the 1992 series and hit the second Series ending, championship winning home run in baseball history in 1993. But the statistical achievement of Joe Carter’s that most impresses me came in 1990, when he played for a bad, (75-87) Padre team that scored 673 runs, (4.15 runs per game: the league average was 4.20). Joe didn’t even have a good year: he hit .232 with 27 doubles and 24 home runs. He drove in 115 runs for that team, 17% of the team’s runs. Nobody else drove in more than 72 runs, (Tony Gwynn had 72, 10.7%). Another power hitter, Jack Clark, had a better year than Carter: .266 with 25 home runs and had 62 RBIs. If what Joe Carter did in San Diego in 1990 isn’t clutch hitting, I don’t know what is. [/QUOTE]

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