Tuesday, August 12, 2014
Situational Hitting Exists
This is a good article by Pizza with a misleading title (I've reflected a more appropriate title on this thread). What Pizza did was identify high leverage situations, and determined the swing frequency of players in high and normal situations, and determined that yes, the leverage of the situation impacts the tendency of a hitter to swing (over and above whatever suggested by league average). That's all that we can conclude here. It does NOT say anything about his "clutchiness" (i.e., RISE to the occasion). A commenter said it well:
I follow the statistical approach and your caveats about it, but I'm not sure I see why swing tendencies are a proxy for clutch hitting. I would agree that a significant swing difference would tend to result in different performance, but not necessarily better or meaningful clutch production.
Pizza concurred:
I used swing tendencies as a proxy for "Is affected by high leverage."
So, this is similar to what Andy found with respect to "protection". Yes, the batter-pitcher matchup is affected based on who the batter is on deck. But, it does not mean the affect is to increase or decrease performance levels. It's simply a SHIFT. The change in behaviour with protection confers no extra advantage.
Similarly here, Pizza shows that we get a change in behaviour, that different batters respond to high leverage situations in different ways. As for change in production, there's no indication in the article that there was any. Increasing or decreasing your swing tendencies doesn't by itself mean that you are producing more or less.?