Blue Jays Discussion: It's a bird, it's a plane, it's Kevin Pillar!

[theaub]

Yeah its weird that the 'winners' are the ones who are good in the 1st and the 9th innings.

 

[hoglund]

Weird that no one is ever able to sustain excellent clutch numbers over long stretches, then. But yay for anecdotal evidence!

I don't think anyone is a clutch hitter, hits happen when they happen, some are more fortunate than others.

 

[ShaneFalco]

Best player overall so far this season? I know small sample size yada yada yada

I'd probably go with Pillar

 

[hoglund]

Best player overall so far this season? I know small sample size yada yada yada

I'd probably go with Pillar

It's only May 14th, the season is a small sample size, in about a month a good sample size would be complete and a real evaluation can be done.

 

[ShaneFalco]

It's only May 14th, the season is a small sample size, in about a month a good sample size would be complete and a real evaluation can be done.

Oh I know, just nice to see some guys really step up with all of the injuries

 

[ShaneFalco]

Happy Mother's Day!

 

[zeke]

It's only May 14th, the season is a small sample size, in about a month a good sample size would be complete and a real evaluation can be done.

yeah it's always hard but you really have to wait until at least june before drawing any conclusions about the players or the team....and even then they'll just be early impressions.

 

[TF97]

Alford hit his third HR today, Rowdy went 0/2 with a walk.

 

[JS19]

Pretty funny that Cleveland fans are getting frustrated with Encarnacion (in fairness, it's only been two months into the season, still plenty of baseball left), while Jays management made out like bandits so far with the Morales signing.

 

[TF97]

Pretty funny that Cleveland fans are getting frustrated with Encarnacion (in fairness, it's only been two months into the season, still plenty of baseball left), while Jays management made out like bandits so far with the Morales signing.

I'm not exactly sure that "made out like bandits" is the appropriate term for the Morales signing. He's been right about average. Yes, he's had some big hits, but his production as a whole has sat right around league average.

 

[The Nemesis]

Clutch is absoloutly a skill. Hitting in the bottom of the 9th with 2 runners on and two out while down a run is so much harder then hitting in the first inning up 1 with 2 runners on and 2 out.

Anyone who has played sports know this. Winners win.

Derek Jeter, the god of intangibles:

.310/.377/.817 slash line (average/OBP/OPS)

In high-leverage situations (late innings, close games, runners on/in scoring position, more outs, anything to make the at bat more important):
.310/.390/.808

just with runners in scoring position, regardless of all other factors:
.301/.393/.810

2 out, bases loaded:
.321/.407/.796 (only 150 career PAs, so mandatory small sample size alert)

In the 7th-9th innings:
.281/.363/.761

extra innings:
.299/.412/.753


career in the post-season:
.308/.374/.838


Derek Jeter, one of the clutchiest clutch players who ever clutched according to pretty much everyone who loves to anoint players as extra impressive for their clutchness, is more or less the same hitter in all of these situations, which are the kinds of situations that the pro-clutch crowd usually points out as the situations where clutchness demonstrates itself.

If you want to argue that clutchness is players not shrinking or collapsing in tense moments, fine. I'll grant that. But the idea of players who magically become better in important situations or "are their best when the game is on the line" is generally unsupportable except by anecdotal evidence like "I've seen that guy have a bunch of clutch hits, so he must be clutch himself." Good players are often clutch because they're good players. Derek Jeter bats over .300 in most of those above-stated clutch situations because Jeter was a career .300+ hitter. Jose Bautista has hit clutch HRs for the Blue Jays over the last few years because Jose Bautista hits a lot of HRs.

Just to put a bit of a cap on this, Fangraphs has a "Clutch" stat that compares player performance based on leverage (again, high leverage are late games, close games, runners on and/or in scoring position, situations with more outs, etc. Low leverage are, unsurprisingly, the opposites) compared to their performance in context neutral situations. It's also normalized so that if a player performs the same in clutch situations as non-clutch, his score would be 0. If he's worse, the score becomes negative, and better the score becomes positive.

Jeter has, for his career, a clutch score of 0.48, which would be classified as roughly above average clutchness. But from season to season? He went as high as 2.33 (incredibly clutch) and as low as -0.83 (pretty unclutch). And the change from year to year vacillated wildly, generally not even being consistently clutch/unclutch for more than 3-4 years in a row before the opposite happened (and in fact his longest streak in either direction was a 4-year run of "choking" from 07-10). Clutchness is not sustainable. It is not something that appears to be consciously controllable or consistent for players. And if data shows something that seems to move independently of the player's performance or skill level or whatever, then it is a pretty high chance that whatever that thing is it is largely random.

 

[metafour]

So much of hitting is pitchers making mistakes and outright luck that its ridiculous to claim that a hitter has conscious control over when they do or don't get a hit. As mentioned above, its more or less all about how good you actually are: good hitters get more hits which means that they'll get more hits in "clutch" situations as well. Ryan Goins had a walkoff hit the other day and yet today with runners on 2nd and 3rd he struck out.

 

[zeke]

Derek Jeter, the god of intangibles:

.310/.377/.817 slash line (average/OBP/OPS)

In high-leverage situations (late innings, close games, runners on/in scoring position, more outs, anything to make the at bat more important):
.310/.390/.808

just with runners in scoring position, regardless of all other factors:
.301/.393/.810

2 out, bases loaded:
.321/.407/.796 (only 150 career PAs, so mandatory small sample size alert)

In the 7th-9th innings:
.281/.363/.761

extra innings:
.299/.412/.753


career in the post-season:
.308/.374/.838


Derek Jeter, one of the clutchiest clutch players who ever clutched according to pretty much everyone who loves to anoint players as extra impressive for their clutchness, is more or less the same hitter in all of these situations, which are the kinds of situations that the pro-clutch crowd usually points out as the situations where clutchness demonstrates itself.

If you want to argue that clutchness is players not shrinking or collapsing in tense moments, fine. I'll grant that. But the idea of players who magically become better in important situations or "are their best when the game is on the line" is generally unsupportable except by anecdotal evidence like "I've seen that guy have a bunch of clutch hits, so he must be clutch himself." Good players are often clutch because they're good players. Derek Jeter bats over .300 in most of those above-stated clutch situations because Jeter was a career .300+ hitter. Jose Bautista has hit clutch HRs for the Blue Jays over the last few years because Jose Bautista hits a lot of HRs.

Just to put a bit of a cap on this, Fangraphs has a "Clutch" stat that compares player performance based on leverage (again, high leverage are late games, close games, runners on and/or in scoring position, situations with more outs, etc. Low leverage are, unsurprisingly, the opposites) compared to their performance in context neutral situations. It's also normalized so that if a player performs the same in clutch situations as non-clutch, his score would be 0. If he's worse, the score becomes negative, and better the score becomes positive.

Jeter has, for his career, a clutch score of 0.48, which would be classified as roughly above average clutchness. But from season to season? He went as high as 2.33 (incredibly clutch) and as low as -0.83 (pretty unclutch). And the change from year to year vacillated wildly, generally not even being consistently clutch/unclutch for more than 3-4 years in a row before the opposite happened (and in fact his longest streak in either direction was a 4-year run of "choking" from 07-10). Clutchness is not sustainable. It is not something that appears to be consciously controllable or consistent for players. And if data shows something that seems to move independently of the player's performance or skill level or whatever, then it is a pretty high chance that whatever that thing is it is largely random.

there is something to be said about maintaining or even just slightly improving your performance in the toughest situations - given both that you're facing the best opposition in those moments, and that i think they're are probably more examples of guys being worse in those sitchys than better.

 

[metafour]

there is something to be said about maintaining or even just slightly improving your performance in the toughest situations - given both that you're facing the best opposition in those moments, and that i think they're are probably more examples of guys being worse in those sitchys than better.

"Clutch" situations also put the most amount of pressure on the pitcher, both in terms of making quality pitches as well as feeling the need to stay within the strike-zone.

 

[The Nemesis]

there is something to be said about maintaining or even just slightly improving your performance in the toughest situations - given both that you're facing the best opposition in those moments, and that i think they're are probably more examples of guys being worse in those sitchys than better.

True. I didn't do much more player-specific research because it's a bit of legwork to find players to look at and run their splits. That said, even with the Jeter he doesn't even have slight improvements over any of those categories except the 2 outs, bases loaded one (which is a small sample size with all its inherent risks). Otherwise the OBP uptick that is present is probably more a symptom of antsy pitchers working around Jeter because of his clutchness rep than it is Jeter stepping up his game.

Also I'm not sure I totally buy into always "facing better opposition" in clutch situations. Maybe in late-innings games when the closer would be in, but given that historically the idea of using the closer outside of the 9th inning in high leverage situations is something that didn't happen (until recently with things like the Indians and Andrew Miller last post-season), most of the time batters are going to be facing the same starting pitcher that began the game and whatever other pen arms are put out there before the 9th.

 

[SDig14]

I had to watch online today and missed the Pearce injury. Was it a minor thing?

Seems as though we are passing calf tightness around like the flu.

Is this the turf catching up to some (JD/Tulo) and affecting the new guys (Pearce/Morales) or is this just the randomness of injuries and all of them happening at once?

 

[LeafsNation75]

I had to watch online today and missed the Pearce injury. Was it a minor thing?

Seems as though we are passing calf tightness around like the flu.

Is this the turf catching up to some (JD/Tulo) and affecting the new guys (Pearce/Morales) or is this just the randomness of injuries and all of them happening at once?

Originally Donaldson got hurt in spring training when they were playing/training on real grass. As for Tulo he got hurt running towards 3rd base in Anaheim which is another real grass stadium.

 

[metafour]

Rowdy slowly but surely coming along:

Gm 01-10: 41pa, 7.3b%/22.0k%, .185bip/.184avg, .158iso, 56wrc+
Gm 11-20: 39pa, 20.5b%/20.5k%, .227bip/.200avg, .133iso, 105wrc+
Gm 21-30: 38pa, 13.2b%/21.1k%, .400bip/.303avg, .121iso, 131wrc+

He's still not hitting for any power. In fact, your own splits show that his ISO is actually dropping. Yeah he's taking some more walks, but I wouldn't call it "coming around" until his power starts materializing again. He is a 1B/DH after all and therefore realistically useless if he's not driving the ball (unless he's going to put up god-like batting average, which no on expects out of him anyway).

 

[Canada4Gold]

So Pillar may not be hitting well in high leverage spots this year but that walk off HR sure as hell helped his WPA. Added 46.4% to it or 0.464. Not quite up to even yet but Ill take the win for now.

Funny enough that wasn't classified as a high leverage spot, the leverage index was only 1.41(high leverage is 2+) because the majority of results there don't change the WPA by much at all. Thankfully he got the 1 hit that made it change drastically and gave us the win.

 

[Canada4Gold]

I'm not exactly sure that "made out like bandits" is the appropriate term for the Morales signing. He's been right about average. Yes, he's had some big hits, but his production as a whole has sat right around league average.

He's been pretty average yep(When I mentioned the signing being good the other day I actually thought he had been better because his big hits were remembered more, memory bias 101). But his impact on the team has actually been really good. WPA of 0.66, 2nd on the team(hitters) behind JD. So he's been really clutch and it's benefited us to this point.

But yeah you wouldn't expect that to continue if he remains a league average hitter. Basically the opposite of the Pillar discussion.

 

[zeke]

He's still not hitting for any power. In fact, your own splits show that his ISO is actually dropping. Yeah he's taking some more walks, but I wouldn't call it "coming around" until his power starts materializing again. He is a 1B/DH after all and therefore realistically useless if he's not driving the ball (unless he's going to put up god-like batting average, which no on expects out of him anyway).

yeah but i'm not worried about his power.

 

[metafour]

yeah but i'm not worried about his power.

Why not? Its been a noted concern as to how his "muscle the ball" power would translate in-game against better pitching, which is one of the reasons why he was "shafted" on prospect lists despite his raw numbers. The whole "he's a really big guy and his stat lines from A+ and AA ball say he should hit for power" thinking doesn't exactly foretell anything. I get the impression that Tellez is more of a "big ogre who shows power when he runs into balls" than he is a naturally explosive bat-speed power hitter, and those types have absolutely been neutralized in the past as they become exposed to more advanced pitching. Its bat-speed over brute strength at the MLB level, always.

We had the whole Bellinger/Tellez discussion months ago and if you've seen Bellinger at all since his call-up you'd know real quick why stat-line scouting alone is useless. It turns out that even though they put up similar numbers at similar levels, the reason why Bellinger was a much better prospect comes down to straight visual scouting.

 

[TF97]

He's been pretty average yep(When I mentioned the signing being good the other day I actually thought he had been better because his big hits were remembered more, memory bias 101). But his impact on the team has actually been really good. WPA of 0.66, 2nd on the team(hitters) behind JD. So he's been really clutch and it's benefited us to this point.

But yeah you wouldn't expect that to continue if he remains a league average hitter. Basically the opposite of the Pillar discussion.

I also was surprised by the average numbers, I too figured he'd at least have a wRC+ around 110, but as you said, the big hits don't help my perception.

 

[habamillions]

Houston all over tanaka

 

[metafour]

Just did some Twitter digging. Blue Jays scouts were seen watching 6'6 175 pound HS RHP Caden Lemons two days ago. Lemons is ranked #74 on MLB.com and #96 on BA.