The Unclutch
The best tradition of a Yankee-infested post-season is the hatchet job to Alex Rodriguez whenever the Yankees fail. They are heading to the tourney this year,which means after Alex Rodriguez’s first 0-for playoff game we’ll get to read about how awful he is in the post-season. With that in mind let’s address the topic before the headlines do.
Alex Rodriguez does not hit well in the playoffs
His career wOBA in the regular season is .412. His career post-season wOBA is .368. Relative to his standards he doesn’t hit well in the playoffs.
He’s been the invisible man with the Yankees
Let’s drop wOBA for a moment and simply look at his playoff series lines in pinstripes:
2004 ALDS: .421/.476/.737 (21 PA)
2004 ALCS: .258/.378/.561 (37 PA)
2005 ALDS: .133/.381/.200 (21 PA)
2006 ALDS: .071/.071/.071 (14 PA)
2007 ALDS: .267/.353/.467 (17 PA)
You have one great series and two awful, and two below A-Rod standards. Invisible? No. Not as good as his regular season self? Yes. The sample size isn’t big enough to say whether this is simply random fluctuation or a fear of the post-season stage.
A-Rod isn’t clutch
Our glossary defines the Clutch statistic as:
Clutch – How much better or worse a player does in high leverage situations than he would have done in a context neutral environment.
You can read more about it here, but let’s look at those playoff years and their Clutch figures:
2004: 0.45
2005: -0.09
2006: -0.08
2007: -0.12
Overall positive, but recent history has been unkind to Rodriguez. How about a quick comparison to Derek Jeter’s figures during that same time period?
2004: -0.05
2005: -0.07
2006: -0.30
2007: -0.01
Oh. Well then.
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How do batters generally fare in the postseason as relative to their regular season performances? I’d imagine that with facing more front of the rotation starting pitching, as well as more reliever specialization (?), not to mention (generally) better than average pitching staffs, it would be more difficult. Toss in some chilly October nights and…
You might also check out Alex Rodriguez’s post-season numbers with Seattle. I suppose that might lead to nonsense about all the extra pressure in NY, so even his 2000 performance against the Yankees when in 25 plate appearances he ended with a line of .409/.480/.773 will be discounted.
And incidentally, I have not checked the leverage indexes for Joe DiMaggio’s post-season performances, but like Rodriguez, his standard numbers alternate between excellent and terrible from series to series. Overall, his line for the World Series is .271/.338/.422, well below his career numbers. Of course, since his team won 9 of the 10 he retained his reputation as a great clutch hitter.
There are basically three reasons for this meme:
1) Expectations are so high that reaching them is extremely difficult (exceeding them impossible).
2) As you noted ARod in the postseason < ARod in the regular season. Jeter in the postseason = Jeter in the regular season (the stat lines are remarkably similar). Ergo ARod wilts under pressure.
3) When Jeter fails, he shakes it off as just baseball. He also has the clutch rep that insulates him, of course. When ARod fails, he has (sometimes) done silly things like taking the blame. Foolish. The sharks just smell blood at that point.
“When ARod fails, he has (sometimes) done silly things like taking the blame.”
Or slap the ball out of the pitchers hand – things like that dont translate to “able to sustain pressure” very well
Season K% – 20.9%
Playoff K% – 25.9%
It’s only 170 PA and over a large spread of his career, but that and his lower HR/FB% are about the only compelling argument for him being less valuable in the playoffs. Of course his career K% has climbed over the years and he isn’t likely to be down at 20% now anyway.
Game 4, 2007 ALDS against the Cleveland Indians:
Bottom of the 7th, Yankees down 6-2, A-Rod steps to the plate and hits a SOLO home run. Sports writers everywhere begin typing.
I can’t tell if this was a shot at A-Rod or the media. I hope the latter (and I say this as a Red Sox fan).
This was immortalized by a series of amazing FJM posts.
http://www.firejoemorgan.com/2007/10/i-recommend-staying-away-from-this-site.html
http://www.firejoemorgan.com/2007/10/still-more-rod.html
http://www.firejoemorgan.com/2007/10/more-rod.html
He was also struck out twice by Paul Byrd that night. Paul Byrd.
We’re talking about Paul Byrd… Paul Byrd
Byrd law in this country is not governed by reason!
So happy Always Sunny is back…
It’s wrong to say A-Rod “does not hit well in the playoffs,” because he HAS hit well in certain playoff series. This proves that there is no immutable trait possessed by A-Rod that prevents him from hitting well once October rolls around. Rather than say A-Rod DOESN’T hit well in the playoffs, the most we can really say is that he HASN’T hit as well in the playoffs as he has during the regular season (which is certainly true of a lot of players, including many in Cooperstown). Whether A-Rod will hit well in future playoffs is anyone’s guess.
Beyond this, it’s important to keep in mind that sub-standard hitting in the playoffs is not necessarily due to a player’s supposed inability to deal with the extra pressure. There are plenty of factors that could account for sub-standard performance in a particular series in October including quality of the opposing pitching and defense, the player’s health, end-of-season fatigue, cold weather, changes to the player’s approach at the plate occasioned by the playoff format, and just random variation. Other than a desire to disparage the player, there’s no reason I can think of for automatically attributing a player’s poor October performance to an inability to deal with pressure, and this is, of course, especially true in the case of a player — like A-Rod — who HAS performed well in the playoffs at certain times.
In years past, Alex taken an all or nothing approach at the plate, particularly in high leverage situations. This year he appears to be realizing that sometimes all his team needs is a base hit with runners on base. He has worked to shorten his stride and put the ball in play rather than swing for the fences each and every AB.
My hope is that this change in approach translates to higher productivity at the plate in October.
Excellent observation. I’ve noticed something different about his approach as well, but couldn’t really pinpoint it.
I highly doubt this to be the case. It’s more than likely people using post-hoc explanations and seeing what they want to see.
Remember before the 2002 playoffs when everyone said that Barry Bonds was a choker in the postseason? Yeah, that was stupid.
It took heavy doses of steroids and HGH for Bonds to overcome his awful postseason performances up until 2002. It took that steroid-fueled postseason to boost Bonds to a .245 BA/.936 OPS player in the postseason. Before he was on steroids, Bonds was a sub-.200 hitter in the playoffs with one career postseason HR. (That lone HR came in a game the Pirates won 13-4 in the 1992 NLCS.)
Bonds was actually a bigger postseason choker than A-Rod.
Things I learned today: Steroids make you clutch.
gO JETeR!!!111!!!11!
You have to understand we have a lot of idiots here (NYC). Remember his 2006 season? When people were saying that he didn’t have what it takes to play in NY? That he couldn’t handle the pressure of playing in NY?
They conveniently forgot that in 2006 he was the defending AL MVP. An MVP award he won, playing in NY.
*sigh*
I’m ready to roast A-Rod if he flops in this year’s playoffs, but first, I want him to win my fantasy league! After that it’s fair to villify.
The ’06 playoffs were also where Joe Torre figured out it was a good idea to have your best hitter bat eighth.
Not just that, b/c that at least came after 3 games of poor performance.
But what people forget is that Torre opened the series with A-Rod batting 6th. A-Rod, coming off a September where he hit .358/.465/.691 and a season where he NEVER hit lower than 5th, was out of the blue dropped in favor of Sheffield who had missed most of the season with a wrist injury.
He was basically telling A-Rod before the series even started that he was going to fail.
That was also the season where Torre basically slagged him to Verducci and revealed private clubhouse details IN THE MIDDLE OF THE SEASON.
Yes, A-Rod, as an inner circle HoFer, should have been able to put this stuff aside and perform anyway. This isn’t meant to excuse A-Rod, but more to question Torre’s leadership towards the end of his Yankee tenure. Torre obviously did a great job for a long time in NY. But when it came to A-Rod, it’s clear he just didn’t know how to handle him.
A-Rod was lucky he was even playing at all. A-Rod went 1-14 with a single in that series. He had finished the the ’04 ALCS on a 1-15 skid, and then had gone 2-15 in the ’05 ALDS. He hadn’t had a postseason RBI since the second or third inning of game four of the ’04 ALCS. He was 1-10 coming-in to the game where Torre batted him eighth.
R.J.,
Don’t clutch numbers measure your clutch performance relative to your regular performance? So if AROD hasn’t hit well overall, it would be easier for him to have better clutch numbers.
I think just using straight WPA is a better measure of clutch skill. Instead of ignoring what you do the rest of the time, it just weights everything based on how important it was.
That being said, AROD still comes out ahead. AROD has 0.66 WPA in 39 games, while Jeter has been basically average, -0.33 in 132 games. I don’t know how he’s done recently though.
I was sure a post called The Unclutch would be about the Jays and their -7.66 (wins) clutch score.
Sigh. Clutch isn’t something you can measure. It’s simply something you site when you want to reaffirm your preconceived biases. I mean… err….
Well, at least if CC pitches the way he had in previous post-seasons, maybe Alex will get a bit of relief this year.
At first when I saw the title of this thread, I thought it was going to be about Matt Kemp.
Didn’t want to say I told you so, but….I told you so….
dude is mired in something like 2 for 20 slump….
Look for a HUGE dropoff in performance next year when the pitchers wise up and law of averages catch up to him….
You say that like you think 20 ABs is a significant measure of anything (do you think Gehrig never went 2 for 20, or Ruth, or DiMaggio, or…?). Did you also notice his BABIP this year is actually a lot lower than it was in 2008 and also below his career average? If the “law of averages catches up to him” we might expect him to do better next year.
I guess if you don’t have eyesight and knowledge of the game, it does, indeed, take a lot of numerical wrangling to knock Jeter’s obviously splendid playoff performances, and praise A-Rod’s obviously terrible playoff performances.
Good call! You catch the game last night?
You’re right, the numbers are wrangled and mean anything. Never mind that Jeter and A-Rod have essentially the exact same wOBA in 110+ PA in the season the Yankees made the playoffs once A-Rod arrived (not counting this year). Jeter is the type of guy that simply “surpasses” numbers in a sort of amorphous fashion only people who “watch the game” can see. Never mind that I’m certain everyone on this site has “watched the game” and have a good “understanding of the game” as well.
I call shenanigans on your point, sir.
“I guess if you don’t have eyesight and knowledge of the game, it does, indeed, take a lot of numerical wrangling to knock Jeter’s obviously splendid playoff performances, and praise A-Rod’s obviously terrible playoff performances.”
Well said!
A-Rod continues to prove that clutch is all about innate ability, not random fluctuation. Once a choker, always a choker. Just ask the Twins.
It takes a lot of wrangling to make everything fit what you are pretty sure your brain thinks you see. Otherwise, what would have been the fun in roasting A-Rod the last half-decade? And it would suck to think for a second that Jeter was not some sort of God of the Super-Clutch, eh?
I’m with you Wayne. I enjoy calling ‘em as I see ‘em, and I’ll be damned if I’m ever going to change my mind simply because an avalanche of evidence to the contrary comes my way! Mind changing and admitting fallibility is for stat-geeks and uber-nerds.