nan....you still have the cake and eat problem to overcome. You are double counting talent. Those clutch situations where the player drives in the surplus runs....comes at the expense of creating such situations In your model, there is no penalty in the 8th inning for failures which took place in the earlier innings. If you are losing 5-1 in the 8th because you failed to score earlier, the value of any clutch hitting in the 8th is offset by those earlier failures. Had they not been failure, there might not be a clutch situation at all in the 8th. It simply does not matter when you do it as long as at some point in the game...you do it.
Something else struck me a short time ago. How come clutch only seems to exist for hitting, at least in terms of what captures the fans minds? How come there aren't any clutch pitchers, clutch fielders or even clutch managers? Why is clutch something that only a has an impact on the hitter? The reason of course is that we made up clutch in our heads for hitters, but didn't bother applying it to the other side of the ledger. Every hit made is a hit surrendered, every strikeout is a hit not gained, every walked charged to a pitcher is a walk gained by a batter and so forth. The books balance.
So, it would have to follow that if there really were players who could elevate their offense in clutch situations, there must also be pitchers who can do it, defenders who can do it...and as noted, even managers who make better decisions when things are more dramatically on the line.
Somehow or other, despite being out there, these folks have escaped notice. Evidence for this is that here we are deep into a discussion of clutch, and this post is the first mention of anything other than clutch hitters. I can recall seeing legions of articles in magazines and newspapers where clutch hitting was discussed, but not a single word about clutch pitching.
That's because it hasn't been invented in our heads yet as clutch hitting has been.
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