Wednesday, August 27, 2014

Down The Stretch, Only Hitting With Runners In Scoring Position Matters

On Monday's "Baseball Tonight" the announcer said something like

"last year with the Cardinals it was all about situational hitting"

Then an analyst said something like

"that's exactly what you want heading down the stretch-its about those timely hits-it doesn't matter what you do the rest of the game-what are you going to do with runners in scoring position?"

I did a study once and found that if you break up performance into  RISP and non-RISP, instead of just using overall performance (like OPS and OPS allowed), you get very little improvement in explanatory power for winning pct. And the coefficients on the non-RISP performance are much higher, meaning they have a bigger impact on winning.

See Does Team Clutch Matter in Baseball?

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