Re-Thinking The Ability of Being Clutch

"If you're a good hitter, you're a good clutch hitter, and if you're a good clutch hitter, you were just a good hitter to begin with." - Keith Law

No matter what sport you watch you will hear the term "clutch." This term is ingrained in many of the minds of young athletes. As a young baseball player I was always loving those "clutch" strikeouts, plays, and hits that Major League players would do as I watched ESPN's SportsCenter every morning before going to school. My friends and I would discuss those same plays the next day at school. Or in Little League practice we would always play clutch situation games after practice just to imagine how it felt.

This is all well and good, but the magical ability of being clutch is just that, magical. The ability of being clutch is simply put made up. A good hitter, fielder, pitcher, is simply a good performer. All of the "clutch" hits that you hear from sports announcers while watching a game are just putting a spin on the ability of the athlete to perform in a high-stakes situation AND come through.

Not believing what I am saying, well let's discuss some studies within the "clutch" situation. In 1977, Dick Cramer wrote in the Baseball Research Journal posing this question, "Do Clutch Hitters Exist?" He took data from 1969 and 1970. With this data he put in some advanced statistics for that time called Player Win Average. He assigned points to a hitter based on what happened in each at bat. What his research found was that if a hitter was "clutch" one year, there was no proof that they would be "clutch" the following year. It is just pure randomness. Here is a quote from Cramer himself, "good hitters are good hitters and weak hitters are weak hitters regardless of the game situation."

Another study was done in Michael Lichtman's and Tom Tango's book from 2007 called, The Book. These authors took a different approach from Cramer's approach. Tango and Lichtman adjusted their study expecting for "clutch" situations. This reason is because stats can obscure a "clutch" situation. Tango and Lichtman found that, "for all practical purposes, a player can be expected to hit equally well in the clutch as he could be expected to do in an ordinary situation." Simply put good hitters hit.

So how do we make performance in the "clutch" easier for our athletes? Athletes can learn how to perform well under pressure through several avenues during practice. One being competitions, so they can feel success and failure. Failure can be an excellent teacher. Another way is through good old-fashioned repetition. You can learn plenty through repetition. I would also suggest diving into the mental game as well. What these stats do not tell us is the peak mental training and confidence that these good players use to make the high-stakes situation feel like a normal situation. The best of the best are the best, when the situation requires them to be at their best. That is why they are "clutch."