Some baseball analysts doubt there’s really such a thing as a clutch hitter. Well, then, how do you explain David Ortiz?!?!?

UPDATE:

E-mail:
Rich-
Although “the desire to believe in the Clutch Hitter resides in every human heart,” let me appeal to your realist sensibilities.
The argument against “special clutch-hitting ability” is that no player has demonstrated over time the ability to hit better in “clutch” situations than he does the rest of the time. David Ortiz is a guy with a .400 on base percentage and a .625+ slugging percentage. He’s a phenomenal hitter, period. But over time (meaning, more than over 100 at bats in two-plus seasons), Ortiz’s “clutch” stats will be in the same range as his baseline stats. The same is true for other legendary “clutch” players, like Reggie Jackson and George Brett. If you sum the stats from their best 8 years, their close and late stats will eerily mirror their overall stats. If clutch-hitting were a true “ability,” heightened offensive performance would be replicated over time, and it isn’t.
The illusion of Ortiz’s special powers is magnified by the fact that he is the only slugger in baseball today who is rarely pitched around in tight situations, due the presence of an offensive titan like Manny Ramirez hitting behind him. So Ortiz may get more actual opportunities in tight games than players with similar ability, like Vlad Guerrero, Albert Pujols. But 3 seasons is no reason to believe that Ortiz will demonstrate, over time, an ability that Stan Musial, Ted Williams, and Barry Bonds never did.

UPDATE:

E-mail: This article on clutch hitting by Baseball Prospectus was reprinted on ESPN.com. It asks the question, “Is David Ortiz a clutch hitter?” The answer is, mostly no. But it does say that Mark Grace was the best clutch hitter since 1972. http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=betweenthenumbers/ortiz/060405 E-mail: Seriously: I’ve thought this for a while: a clutch hitter is someone able to maintain his normal functioning in the most pressure-packed situation. Not to raise it consistently; to maintain it consistently. Common sense and stats would tell us there are players who couldn’t and can’t do that. It’s very clear in golf, where some golfers get to the lead in a major and fall apart quickly. Pressure causes tension and etc., and of course that can affect performance. E-mail: Rich – This is also related to the false belief in the “hot hand” in basketball, where a player feels more likely to hit a shot after a series of hit shots. There have been studies that debunk this phenomenon as well – a player’s probability of making a shot is no higher given a previous sequence of made shots than it is overall. See this. http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~cconley/2003_JSEP.pdf E-mail: Hi Rich, For what it’s worth: I was a baseball writer for the Orange County Register, covering the California Angels in 1982, when Reggie Jackson joined the team. I once asked manager Gene Mauch about Jackson’s ability to elevate his performance in the clutch. Mauch was as smart a baseball man as I had ever been around. His feeling was that Reggie did not elevate his game in the clutch, that he only gave the appearance of doing so, because lesser players’ performance (i.e.most pitchers) fell off in pressure situations, meaning that Jackson was likely to get better pitches to hit in clutch situations.