What if Williams and DiMaggio had traded places?

Since Ted Williams made his debut in 1939, baseball's hot stove has been fired by debates about whether Williams and Joe DiMaggio might have been even greater players if they had traded places, therefore landing each of them in a park better suited to his skills. Since we now have detailed information about how each player performed in each park since the mid-20s, it's easy enough to offer a reasonable guess about how this imaginary swap might have worked out.

But the discussion probably should start by examining whether the question is even worth asking. Let's examine some of the underlying suppositions:

How do lefties perform in Fenway Park?

For various hypothetical reasons, people have long assumed that Fenway Park can be a difficult offensive environment for left-handed hitters like Williams. That assumption is simply not supported by facts. Every great left-handed hitter who has played for the Red Sox in the lively ball era has performed far better in Fenway than out of it.

First, consider the case of two slim, elegant outfielders who played together in the 70s: Fred Lynn and Carl Yastrzemski. Outside of Fenway they were .265 hitters with moderate power (OPS below .800 in both cases), but they terrorized opposing pitchers in Boston, especially Lynn, who hit .347 in Fenway, with an OPS over 1.000.

But the Fenway advantage is not limited to any specific type of lefty. The two big, muscular, lumbering sluggers in the group experienced the same kind of advantage. Mo Vaughn and David Ortiz were more powerful than Lynn and Yaz outside of Fenway, but still form two more examples of the lefty Fenway prototype: a .265-hitting Clark Kent transformed by Fenway into Superman with a .300+ batting average and an OPS right around 1.000.

The final examples add two more types of hitters: Wade Boggs, a skillful line drive hitter who liked to use the opposite field when given the opportunity, and Ted Williams, a powerful hitter who almost never hit to the opposite field. Their stats demonstrate that Fenway enhances the production of any kind of lefty hitter. Both of these hitting machines, although polar opposites in their hitting approaches, were able to produce Fenway batting averages in the .360s.

The composite of these six hitters creates a profile how how much the career of a great left-handed hitter can benefit from playing in Fenway Park.

• As a group they batted .332 in Fenway, .283 elsewhere. (+49 points)
• Their on-base percentage was .434 in Fenway, .377 elsewhere. (+57 points)
• Their slugging average was .565 in Fenway, .473 elsewhere. (+92 points)

Since a major leaguer plays half of his games in his home park, a lefty who plays his career in Fenway (as opposed to a hypothetical neutral park) can expect to add about 25 points to his batting average and nearly 50 points to his slugging average. That is very close to what actually happened to Yastrzemski and Williams, who did play their entire careers in Boston.

How did Williams perform in Yankee Stadium?

A look at Ted's lifetime statistics in Yankee Stadium reveal that he would not have enjoyed as productive a career there as he did in Boston. The simplest way to demonstrate that is by comparing his performances in Fenway Park and Yankee Stadium per 600 plate appearances:

From these batting lines we can reach some fairly accurate conclusions about how a theoretical move from Fenway to Yankee Stadium might have affected Williams's individual stats. For every 600 plate appearances (roughly equivalent to two seasons' worth of home games), we can see that only two counting stats are significantly different: Yankee Stadium would have converted some 25 doubles into walks. His OBP, therefore, would remain about the same in the hypothetical relocation, but his batting and slugging averages would suffer.

I can only guess why Williams took more pitches and hit fewer doubles in Yankee Stadium. 

(1) While both parks had short porches along the right field line and Fenway is deeper near the line, Yankee Stadium was deeper in right center and center. A 400-foot fly ball was always good for extra bases in Fenway, while Yankee Stadium produced many 400-foot outs with DiMaggio patrolling center. The depth of Yankee Stadium was not as traumatic for left-handed sluggers as for righties, but it gave those lefties some fits as well. See the dimensions pictured in the illustration below, which represents both parks as they were configured in Williams' day (click to enlarge).

(2) Managers rarely start a left-handed pitcher in Fenway Park because of the short distances in left field. For example, Casey Stengel would notoriously skip Whitey Ford's turn whenever the Yankees traveled to Boston. From 1950 until 1960, his eleven seasons under the Ol' Perfessor, Ford started only five games in Fenway Park. Stengel knew what he was doing. During the course of his lifetime, Ford had a lower earned run average than Sandy Koufax, but Whitey's lifetime ERA in Fenway was a disastrous 6.16!! 

In contrast, managers loaded up their rotations with lefties to pitch in Yankee Stadium because the distant fences from left center to straightaway center made that area Death Valley for right-handed sluggers. In the 1950s, where we have complete data available (unlike the 1940s), left handers started 29% of all American League games, and 33% of the games at Yankee Stadium, but only 11% of the games at Fenway. By playing half of his games in Fenway Park, Williams faced left-handed starters in only about 20% of his career games, while DiMaggio's Yankees, playing half of their games in the Bronx, faced lefty starters approximately 31% of the time.

Since a left-handed slugger would face far more lefty pitchers in Yankee Stadium than in Fenway Park, his overall performance would decline in the Bronx even if all other factors were constant. Even a great hitter like Williams was not immune to the platoon disadvantage. He batted only .318 throughout his career in games started by left-handed pitchers, versus .351 in his other games.

(3) Williams himself claimed that pitchers would pitch to him in Fenway because they felt protected by the the deep fence in right-center, but would always pitch around him in Yankee Stadium. He knew his game pretty well, and that explanation is consistent with the substantial increase in walks that he experienced in the Bronx.

Wasn't Williams' sub-Splinter performance in Yankee Stadium just a result of having to face the great Yankee pitching staff there?

Short answer: no. Long answer: hell, no.

Williams didn't seem to have any problem hitting against that vaunted staff in Fenway Park.

Although Teddy Ballgame's line against the Yankee pitchers in Yankee Stadium was .309/.484/.543, it was quite a different story in Fenway Park, where his line against the Yankees was off the charts, with a .375 batting average. (.515 OBP/.663 SLG).

The specific differences between the two performances are much the same as Williams's overall splits between Fenway and Yankee Stadium. His home run rate was almost identical in both parks, but per 600 plate appearances, Williams drew 28 more walks at Yankee Stadium while hitting 30 fewer doubles (!!) That's not a misprint. He hit 46 doubles per 600 plate appearances against Yankee pitching at home, but only 16 in the Bronx.

Overall, how would the move have affected Williams?

If you knew everything above, you would never have asked the Williams/DiMaggio question in the first place, because you would realize that Fenway is a hitters' paradise, even for lefties, and you would realize that Williams did not meet our expectation for Splinter-like success at Yankee Stadium. Williams' career totals would have been significantly diminished if he had played in the Bronx. The mental picture we have formed of Ted Williams' hitting abilities is there because of Fenway, not in spite of it.

The hypothetical move is relatively easy to approximate. We will give him the number of plate appearances in Yankee Stadium that he had in Fenway and vice-versa, while keeping his performance per plate appearance constant with what he actually accomplished in those parks. We will leave his performance in all other parks untouched.

The following chart shows the result of that extrapolation:

	Actual Career:	Projected career:
PA	9788	9788
AB	7706	7528
H	2654	2425
2B	525	362
3B	71	54
HR	521	508
BB	2021	2207
BA	.344	.322
OBP	.482	.476
SLG	.634	.587
OPS	1.116	1.063

Note that this extrapolation assumes that Williams would have the same number of plate appearances in the Bronx as he actually had at Fenway. That would not have happened in reality. He would have had fewer plate appearances if his home games had been in Yankee Stadium because there are fewer hits and runs there than in Fenway, hence fewer total plate appearances for everyone. (In the course of his career, Williams had 712 plate appearances against Yankee pitching at home, but only 639 at Yankee Stadium, but I don't know how much of that is attributable to run scoring and how much was created by management decisions.) If I were to adjust for a presumed decrease in home plate appearances, and a corresponding increase in road appearances at Fenway, all of his lifetime percentage stats would be a little bit higher in the "projected career" shown above because he would spend a greater percentage of his time in more favorable offensive environments. On the other hand, the counting stats would be lower because of the reduced number of opportunities. He might never have hit that 500th homer if he had been a Yankee.

And what about Mr. Coffee?

If you've been paying attention to the above, you undoubtedly realize that any right handed power hitter at Yankee Stadium would have profited from a move to Fenway Park, although the massive difference in the dimension of the parks in left and left center would be mitigated slightly by the steady diet of right-handed pitchers who take the mound at Fenway. Joltin' Joe's line at Yankee Stadium was .315/.391/.547 as compared to .334/.410/.605 at Fenway.

The difference can be summarized by just two transpositions, and they both make perfect sense.

Per 600 plate appearances:

1. DiMaggio made 10 more outs at Yankee Stadium, and hit 9 fewer homers, so 9 or 10 of his Yankee Stadium fly-outs would have left the park in Fenway, precisely what we would have predicted from looking at the dimensions of the two stadiums.


2. DiMaggio hit four more doubles at Fenway, but 5 more triples in the Bronx. This again is completely consistent with what we would have expected, since a lot of liners in the gaps would hit the fence in Fenway and bounce back to the fielders, but would just keep rolling in the vast confines of center and left center in Yankee Stadium.

His rates for singles and walks were nearly identical in both parks.

Performing the same extrapolations used for Williams creates the following projections for DiMaggio's hypothetical career with Fenway as his home.

	Actual Career:	Projected career
PA	7672	7672
AB	6821	6820
H	2214	2268
2B	389	411
3B	131	105
HR	361	410
BB	790	806
BA	.325	.333
OBP	..398	.406
SLG	.579	.604
OPS	.977	1.010

Conclusions

If Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio had swapped home parks, it would have worked out very well for DiMaggio, but not for Williams. As a result of DiMaggio improving while Williams declined, the theoretical swap would have resulted in DiMaggio finishing with a higher career batting average than Williams (.333 to .322) and a higher slugging average (.604 to .587). DiMaggio would also have picked up some 50 additional home runs. Williams, however, would still have the higher OPS by more than 50 points, thanks to a massive difference in on-base percentage (.476 versus .406 ).

Does that mean that DiMaggio was significantly closer to Ted's level than previously believed? No, not really. Slightly, yes. Significantly, no. This extrapolation does not level the scales. It simply tips the scales from an advantage for Williams to an advantage for DiMaggio. The theoretical careers for the two hitters just seem closer together than their real careers because of the imbalance of plate appearances at Fenway. Drilling down the stats, an observer will note that Williams out-hit Dimaggio in almost every park, so if the players had a perfectly level playing field, with the same number of plate appearances in every park, thereby denying the Fenway advantage to both of them, a straight average of the percentage stats in all the ballparks they both played in would look like this:

Williams: .337/.480/.637         1.117 OPS
DiMaggio: .329/.403/.592         .995 OPS

That would still leave Ted Williams with an hypothetical edge of 122 points in OPS, compared to his actual of 139. That leads us to believe that DiMaggio is slightly closer to Williams than their career OPS numbers would lead one to believe.

But just slightly.

A journey back to the deadball era in high-resolution photos

A century ago, before the construction of Fenway Park, there were two major league ballparks side-by-side in the south of Boston. And I mean truly side-by-side. Of course, it is not that rare in baseball history to have had National and American League parks in close proximity. Over the years there have been many major league neighbors.

The Polo Grounds and Yankee Stadium were separated by little more than a river.

Shibe Park and the rickety old Baker Bowl were on the same Philadelphia street, separated by only a few city blocks.

But the distances between those parks seem like light years compared to the space between South End Grounds, home of the National League team we now know as the Braves, and Huntington Avenue Grounds, the pre-Fenway home of the Red Sox, who were known earlier as the Pilgrims. Operating together from 1901 to 1911, the two parks were separated only by some railroad tracks.

The two parks were so close together that the best wide-angle or panoramic views of the Huntington Avenue Grounds would clearly show the grandstands, bleachers and outfield billboards of the South End park. The picture below was taken of the Huntington Avenue Grounds during the first World Series, which took place in 1903. (You can click on the image below to download a 4364x3336 version which is a must for your collection if you are into old-time baseball). If you move your eyes directly up from the pitcher's mound, you will see the grandstand of the other park, which looks like this:

As your eyes continue leftward, you will see the outfield fence and a portion of the bleachers. In the full-sized version you can clearly read the outfield billboards in both parks.

You will note in the picture that the fans are forming a ring in the outfield. This was the standard procedure at Huntington for overflow crowds, which happened frequently, because the seating capacity in the park was capable of handling only about a third of the people who showed up on the busiest days! That disparity is the main reason why Fenway Park was built in the first place. Cutting off the outfield area didn't really present much of a problem for game play, since balls rarely flew into even the shallowest reaches of the stands in the deadball era, so they would certainly not reach the center field fence, which in that park was 530 feet away at its most distant configuration. Many deadball players couldn't reach that with their two longest hits added together! The image below, again available in ultra-high resolution with a click of the mouse (it's so large you'll have a delay in the download, but it's another must-have for collectors), pictures a game between Boston and New York in 1904 and shows just how roomy the stadium was. The crowd forming the ring is more than 100 feet behind the center fielder, yet there is still a vast distance between those fans and the others back by the fence.

You can't get an idea from the thumbnail of just how much detail is available in the full image. The quality of the image is so spectacular that the individual fans closest to the camera on the far left could be clearly and easily identified. I don't know anything about the history of photography, so I had no clue that the photographers of 1904 possessed the technology to produce such an image.

And that image, impressive as it may be, is not my favorite of the group. The picture that inspired me to research and present this article was taken on Saturday, August 5, 1911. It was the last year that the Red Sox would play on Huntington Avenue, and the great Ty Cobb was in town with the visiting Detroit Tigers. Cobb was on his way to a spectacular season, and was the league's ultimate drawing card. The game set an all-time attendance record, not just for this park, but for any park in baseball history to that date, as reported in this article in the next day's Washington Post.

The attendance of 33,904 may not seem impressive in 2016, but it placed a significant strain on a park with an official seating capacity of 11,000! As seen in the image below, the fans were jammed in everywhere, many of them balanced precariously on the fences.

Once more the full-sized version is available with a mouse click on the image above, and is required viewing for anyone curious about baseball in America a century ago.

As identified on the scoreboard, the game action is taking place in the bottom of the second, with the Red Sox at bat. A complete account of the game, including a box score, is available from the next day's edition of the Detroit Free Press. The visiting Tigers, who were chasing the powerful A's for the league leadership, took the game 7 to 4, despite four hits from Boston's star, Hall of Famer Tris Speaker, who was generally considered the best defensive center fielder in history until Willie Mays came along.

The opposing center fielder, pictured playing his position in the photograph, is the legendary Ty Cobb, who had two hits that day while hitting in the third spot in the line-up. One of his hits knocked in the game's first run, which put the Tigers ahead for good. Cobb was on his way to the best season of perhaps the greatest career in the history of the game. In a unanimous vote, he would win the Chalmers Award as the league's best player. He batted .420 and led the league in doubles, triples, runs scored, runs batted in, stolen bases, and just about anything else you can think of except home runs, where he had to settle for second place behind Home Run Baker.

The Tigers' right fielder and clean-up hitter was Wahoo Sam Crawford (right), another great Hall of Famer, who once led the league in homers, but specialized in triples, a category he led six times despite competing directly against Cobb. Crawford still holds the all-time record for the most triples in a career, and probably always will, with 309. (Cobb is second.) Crawford, headed to a season mark of .378 with 115 RBI, also had two hits that day.


Playing first base and batting fifth for the Tigers was Jim Delahanty, brother of another great Hall of Famer and a solid star in his own right. Delahanty batted .339 that year and knocked in 94 runs. It was the best of his 13 major league seasons.

Despite all that talent, the visiting Tigers were to finish a dozen games behind the Philadelphia A's that year. While the Tigers were about equal to the A's in offensive firepower, they could not match the great pitching of Connie Mack's Philadelphia team, which featured two Hall of Famers in the rotation and a third pitcher who won 28 games! The A's allowed fewer runs than any other team, while the Tigers finished second-last in that category. In fact, the Tigers were actually on the way downward in 1911 after trips to the World Series in 1907-1909. Despite their great hitting, they would not win another American League pennant until 1934. The hometown Red Sox, although mediocre in 1911 at 78-75, were headed in the other direction, building a powerhouse that would win the World Series the following year on the strength of an epic season from their pitching ace Smoky Joe Wood, who would compile an astounding 34-5 record in 1912. When Wood developed arm troubles, the mighty A's would bounce back to win the pennant in the following two years, but when financial pressures forced Mack to sell off his best players from the A's after the 1914 season, the Red Sox became indisputably the best team in baseball in the late teens. Unfortunately for the Boston partisans, the Sox fell deep into the doldrums after they would sell a certain young pitcher-outfielder named George Herman Ruth to the New York Yankees, thus bringing the so-called "curse of the Bambino" down upon their heads. Whether they were "cursed" or not, the fact remains that, after winning the World Series three times in four years (1915, 1916, 1918), the Bosox would not win another in the next 85 Octobers.

The Huntington Avenue Grounds had a relatively short lifespan. The land, trapped between two different rail lines, was available at a low price, and the entire stadium was built in 1901 for a mere $35,000, according to this plan, with the left field line running approximately south to north:

Without sufficient seating to accommodate the burgeoning crowds of the increasingly popular national pastime, and heading into the age of the automobile without a parking lot, Huntington Grounds was obviously not going to be anything more than a temporary home for the Red Sox. When Fenway Park was ready, the Huntington Avenue ballpark was soon demolished, and the land eventually became the site of Northeastern University. The 2016 image below is positioned at approximately the same orientation as the picture above from the 1911 game, showing the same part of Huntington Avenue and the parallel railroad tracks.

You may notice that the center of the university contains a label that says "Cy Young." This refers to a statue of the famous hurler which has been placed on the exact location where he stood to pitch in the old ballpark.

Cy, the winningest pitcher in history, was an important cog in the Boston team which won the very first World Series in that very location. The 1903 Boston "Pilgrims," champions of the upstart American League, which was then only three years old, were able to defeat the favored Pittsburgh Pirates of the long-established National League in a "best of nine" series. Despite falling behind three games to one, it took the American Leaguers only eight games to defeat the Pirates, with their fifth and final win coming at home. Cy Young won 28 games in the regular season that summer and added two more victories in the World Series. He was also one of the team's best hitters, posting a sparkling .321 batting average during the season.

His totem is not isolated in that college courtyard. The exact location of home plate is also marked, and Cy still faces it appropriately today, and perhaps will until the very end of days.

Meanwhile, baseball in Boston continues not so far away from that spot. Fenway Park replaced the Huntington Grounds less than a year after the 1911 game pictured above, and it is still in use today, a welcome reminder of America's and baseball's gentler past. The satellite image below shows Northeastern University, where Huntington once stood, on the bottom right. Fenway Park is seen on the top left, only about a half mile away.

Who are the great clutch hitters of modern times?

Many of the finest baseball minds believe that clutch hitting doesn't really exist; that it is an illusion created by a confluence of chance and small sample sizes. Before I started to research the subject, I was completely in that camp, and was willing to go even a step further. I theorized that if clutch hitting did exist, I would be suspicious of it. If a player is capable of hitting better in clutch situations than he does at other times, why doesn't he just perform like that at those other times? Is he too lazy? Unmotivated? I was, however, willing to concede that clutch hitting might have an opposite - choking. If some ballplayers choke under pressure then, by definition, those who do not choke are better clutch hitters, in which case clutch hitting does exist, albeit as the absence of a negative, rather than the presence of a positive.

In order to evaluate all those hypotheses, it is necessary to have facts and a definition of clutch hitting. Perhaps someday a sabermetrician will dig into each player's career at-bat by at-bat, identifying every moment that represented a clutch situation, and assigning a weight to each of those moments by the degree of pressure, finally determining who the greatest clutch hitters are. For now, we have something tangible, simple and transparent that can stand as a surrogate for that missing information: performance in the late innings of close games. Not only are these moments reasonably identified as clutch situations, but all the data are readily available at baseball-reference.com, so any of you can easily verify any claims I make here.

The statistic does have some weaknesses:

1. Clutch data is not directly comparable to non-clutch data, because pitchers behave differently in the late innings of close games. Moreover, pitchers alter their behavior even more for great hitters like the ones studied here. If a pitcher is ahead or behind by ten runs, there is no special reason to pitch around the great Joe DiMaggio, but if the moundsman is protecting a one-run lead in the ninth inning, it's a whole 'nother kettle of crawdads. The most obvious result of this disparity is that great hitters draw a lot more semi-intentional walks in the late innings of close games. No professional hurler is going to allow DiMaggio to see one he can drive, if that can be avoided.

2. Adjustments are necessary in order to compare players from different eras. In the era before pitch counts, when starters were expected to finish the game, hitters in general performed better in the late innings than they did early in the game, probably because they were often facing a tiring starter. That has gradually but inexorably changed in the past fifty years, so that hitters in general now perform much worse in late/close situations than they do overall. Instead of facing a worn-down starter, they are usually facing a fresh, strong arm, occasionally one chosen specifically to face them because of the match-up history. While Ted Williams might have been facing a tired Bob Lemon, throwing his 150th pitch in the 9th inning and struggling to reach 85 MPH, Joey Votto in the same situation might be staring down the barrel of a fresh Aroldis Chapman bringing his first pitch of the day at 104, and typically striking out fifteen batters per nine innings.

Baseball is a tradition-bound game. Quite astoundingly, it took baseball's managers nearly a century before they even started to realize that it was not wise to let starting pitchers finish so many games. Even the very best and very toughest pitchers in history tended to flag as the game wore on. Let's take a couple of dramatic examples: no modern pitcher was better at completing a game than Warren Spahn (382 CG, tops by a mile among post-WW2 pitchers), and nobody was tougher than Bob Gibson (in his best years he completed 80% of his starts). Yet they both flagged in the late innings. Their strikeouts declined by about ten percent. Batters' OPS production increased by about five percent overall, slightly more in close games.

Opp. OPS	Innings 1-6	Innings 7-end	Innings 7-end (close)	Decline in 7-end	Decline in 7-end (close)
Bob Gibson	.613	.642	.654	4.7%	6.7%
Warren Spahn	.643	.676	.678	5.1%	5.4%
K/9	Innings 1-6	Innings 7-end		Decline in 7-end
Bob Gibson	7.4	6.7		-9.4%
Warren Spahn	4.6	4.0		-15.0%

Pitchers work harder than batters, and thus tire sooner, but in the past they would often remain in the game, thus giving hitters an advantage as the game progressed. But those were the old days. Batters can no longer count on improving their performance in the late innings. As the game has evolved, starters get pulled earlier, and relievers become more specialized. Perhaps the only thing that pushes a starter to the end of the fifth inning today is the old-time tradition that the starter needs five innings of work to get the win, but even that could be challenged some day. As the analytical management style continues to dominate the game, baseball is loosening its grip on the traditions which are unsupported by empirical evidence. Sometime in the future, perhaps sooner than we expect, baseball franchises with nothing to lose will experiment with three-inning starters, or even with having nine men pitch an inning apiece. The first time such an experiment produces a dramatic improvement in the win column, old-time baseball's floodgates will open, and the modern world will come pouring through. For now, however, let's consider what has happened so far.

The drop-off in late inning performance has been quite dramatic over the years, and has not yet bottomed out, as shown in the following table. The table uses American League data only, and only since the inception of the DH, in order to remove pitchers from the equation. (They bat less frequently in the later innings, and thus pollute the data).

American League OPS, all players
	Late and Close	Overall	Difference
1973-1978	.701	.706	-0.8%
1979-1987	.718	.731	-1.8%
1988-1997	.714	.743	-3.9%
1998-2014	.718	.755	-4.8%
2015-2016	.691	.737	-6.3%

The good news is that we know all of this, and can therefore establish a reasonable expectation of how any given hitter should perform in late/close situations, given his overall level of performance. The OPS of Ted Williams, for example, is expected to be about 1% better in late/close situations than his overall number, while Mike Trout's late/close OPS is expected to be about 6% worse than his overall career norm. These estimates vary based upon the actual years in which the player appeared, and while they are estimates, work very well in general. Making the appropriate adjustments, I estimated that my selected group of players would have a cumulative OPS of .901 in late/close situations, and they actually produced .899.

Why did I use OPS? It is the most easily and readily available surrogate for run production. As the pioneer sabermetrician Bill James has pointed out, OxS (on base times slugging) actually correlates more closely to runs than OPS, but OPS is available and transparent, so it's the best user-friendly metric. It's also much easier for all of us to use and manipulate. Most people who are at all interested in numbers can calculate that a .350 OBP plus a .550 SLG equals a .900 OPS, but not many people can multiply two three-digit numbers in their heads.

There is one remaining question, and it's an important one. Is clutch hitting properly defined by actual performance in late/close situations, or by the improvement (or lack of decline) in performance? That is more a matter of opinion than analysis, so I'm going to place both into a sortable table. You can decide which assumption suits you.

I think that's probably enough disclaimers and caveats. We should probably postpone any additional verbiage until you've had a first look at the results and a chance to tinker with them.

Here are a few notes necessary to read and interpret the data:

1. The OPS+ in clutch situations is a crude estimate based on the OPS ratio. That is to say that if a player's OPS was 6% better than expected in clutch situations, I estimated that his clutch OPS+ was also 6% better than his overall OPS+. Why bother with this? It's necessary to convert OPS to OPS+ to make the data more meaningful, otherwise you would have no way of knowing that Dick Allen's clutch .925 is actually quite a bit better than Stan Musial's clutch .990!



2. The far right column is the ratio of actual clutch performance to expected clutch performance, multiplied times 100. In other words, a score of 111 means the clutch performance is 11% better than expected.



3. You will note that some of the items in the far right column are in red bold type. These are the only ones in which the difference between the distribution of hits in non-clutch and clutch situations is statistically significant at a 95% confidence level. In other words, if Mickey Mantle's non-clutch plate appearances were divided into random samples the size of his clutch appearances, his actual clutch performance would be above the 97.5th percentile of those samples, or would have less than a 5% chance of occurring in that population. Similarly, Ernie Banks' actual clutch performance would be below the 2.5th percentile. In other words, except for those six players with red ratios, you're just studying the table out of curiosity. It's nice to know that the player you love performed 4% better than expected, and the guy you hate fell 6% below, but none of those facts are statistically significant. That's like comparing a .305 hitter during a single season to a .295 hitter: one number is better cosmetically, but does not represent significant evidence of better hitting.

So what have we learned?

Well, first and most obviously, we have learned that it doesn't matter how you sort the data when it comes to the number one spot. It's Mickey Mantle. The Oklahoma Kid was the best hitter in clutch situations, and he was also the guy who improved the most from his normal performance. Here's how it breaks down:

Mickey Mantle per 550 at-bats
	singles	2b+3b	HR	walks	avg
in clutch situations	98	33	46	140	.321
in non-clutch situations	99	28	35	114	.294

As you can see from the data, Mickey profited greatly from pitchers' fear. In non-clutch situations, the Commerce Comet walked a lot - 114 times for every 550 at-bats, but with the game on the line in the late innings, that number rose to a superhuman 140 because no pitcher in his right mind would intentionally give Mickey a pitch to hit. He also had the advantage of being a switch hitter, so opposing managers did not have many options when it came to relief pitchers. When he made contact, Mantle did not hit significantly more singles, doubles and triples, but his homer production increased more than 30%. Basically, he sat and waited, willing to take a walk if there was nothing in the zone, but swinging with all his considerable might if the pitcher released one he could take downtown. In those late inning pressure situations, The Mick transformed from a .294 hitter with a seasonal average of 35 homers and 114 walks into a .321 hitter with 46 homers and 140 walks!

The other three players who had significant increases in their performances with the game on the line are a more interesting group, in a way, because they may not be the players you expected. When I began this study I thought the great clutch hitters would be players like Reggie Jackson, Derek Jeter, and especially David Ortiz, who always seems to deliver in the big moments. It turns out that none of those players were especially good at stepping it up in the clutch. The other three great clutch hitters are Jackie Robinson, Roberto Clemente, and the Toy Cannon, Jimmy Wynn. Jackie Robinson was especially productive, actually tying Mantle for the highest percentage increase in critical situations. Two other players almost made the list: Tony Perez and Yogi Berra.

Note that these three men stand out based on their ability to improve in clutch situations, not their actual OPS+ in those instances. Ted Williams performed substantially worse with the game on the line than he did in other situations (it was almost a statistically significant difference, but not quite), while Jimmy Wynn performed substantially better, but a manager would still prefer to have Williams in the batters' box, because 94% of Ted Williams is still a lot better than 108% of Jimmy Wynn. In fact, 94% of Ted Williams is still better than anyone else in the clutch, except Mickey Mantle.

Clemente basically improved with singles. His power and walks improved a tiny bit, albeit on a small base, but his batting average improved from .313 in non-clutch situations to .341 in the clutch.

Jim Wynn, surprisingly, also improved with singles. His sum total of EBH plus walks actually declined a bit, but his batting average jumped from .244 in non-clutch situations to .279 in late/clutch appearances.

I am assuming that Clemente and Wynn were just smart, unflappable hitters who bore down and concentrated on meeting the ball in those late situations. Jackie Robinson, on the other hand, just plain got fierce:

Jackie Robinson per 550 at-bats
	singles	2b+3b	HR	walks	avg
in clutch situations	128	36	24	97	.341
in non-clutch situations	117	37	14	81	.306

Like Mantle, his homers and walks improved in clutch appearances. Unlike Mantle, his singles production also increased. When the chips were down he turned from a .306 hitter with 14 homers and 81 walks into a .341 hitter with 24 homers and 97 walks. With the game on the line, he played like a man with something to prove.

Which he was.

I really don't want to dwell on the players at the bottom of the list, because I prefer to celebrate greatness, but I would be remiss in failing to see that Ernie Banks, whom I greatly admired as a player and a man, really fell apart in the clutch. On the surface, the smiling, affable, easy-going Banks seemed like the kind of man who would maintain his composure at all times and be unlikely to fold under pressure. Obviously, he had a more complicated psyche than fans realized, because he regressed into a very ordinary player in the late innings of close games. In the chart below you can see that he was roughly equivalent to Mickey Mantle in non-pressure situations (except for Mickey's walks, of course) but that there was a massive gulf between them with the game on the line in the late innings. Ernie's power production evaporated, while Mickey's exploded.

Per 550 non-clutch at-bats
	1b	2b	3b	HR	BB	avg
Ernie Banks	92	25	6	31	42	.279
Mickey Mantle	99	23	5	35	114	.294
Per 550 clutch at-bats
	1b	2b	3b	HR	BB	avg
Ernie Banks	93	20	2	22	60	.250
Mickey Mantle	98	26	7	46	140	.321

One more thing:

Amazingly enough, as I was studying this subject, I found that the greatest clutch hitter of modern times, at least in terms of improvement from non-clutch to clutch at bats, is somebody you may not remember at all. The reason he does not appear in the main table is that he had only about a thousand at-bats in his major league career, but he had an absolutely astounding improvement in late/close situations. The batter is Joe Lefebvre, who played for the Yankees, Padres and Phillies in the early 80s.

The table below says it all:

Joe Lefebvre per 550 at bats
	1b	2b	3b	HR	BB	avg
in non-clutch situations	87	24	6	14	69	.238
in clutch situations	119	36	8	23	74	.338

Lefebvre once won a triple crown in the minors (Eastern League, 1979), and a lot of people must realize that he knows a thing or two about hitting, despite his mediocre major league stats, because he is still in the game to this day, at age 60, currently working on the staff of the major league Giants (image left), having spent some thirty years as a hitting instructor at various minor league levels, first with the Phillies' organization in the late 80s, then with the Yankees from 1990 to 1996. The years in those organizations are encapsulated in the images below. He finally landed in the Giants' camp in 1997, eventually becoming an assistant hitting coach for the big league club in 2013. As of 2016, he has left that position to perform various scouting duties for the Giants.

If Lefebvre had appeared in the main table, his ratio of actual clutch OPS to expected clutch OPS would have been 129 - although nobody actually on the table had a ratio higher than 111! That ratio was so high that the results were statistically significant despite a relatively small sample size. So hats off to Joe Lefebvre, the .238 hitter with moderate power who underwent a metamorphosis into a slugger with a .338 batting average and a .970 OPS when the game was on the line, making him arguably the greatest clutch hitter in modern baseball history.

Who knew?