Two Fascinating Facts from MLB this season:
 

...this were pulled from an Espn.com article:

And Pujols has been the least-valuable player in baseball, by WAR. And he has also been the third most clutch hitter in baseball? Cute conceit, but life doesn't really work that way.

Craig Kimbrel has allowed baseball's highest exit velocity this year, and the fifth-lowest WHIP of all-time.


Just goes to show that you can find statistics that will say anything about any player...perhaps this is why arbitration meetings are son involved.



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To me the first one with Pujols just shows how silly WAR really is. He has 23 HR and 100RBI you have to seriously make up stuff to consider him the worst player in baseball.:)

it's because you don't understand WAR.

WAR is a cumulative stat, Pujols is the worst player among all players with enough PA's to qualify for the batting title, and has been worth -1.7 fWAR.

His wRC+ (weighted runs created, the most accurate of all hitting stats) is 80 (20% BELOW avg of 100)

his baserunning is woeful -5.4 which dings his WAR

his gets dinged for being a DH on defense because he makes no defensive contribution.

sure you can cherry pick homers and RBI's and ignore everything else but his slash line of .244/.290/.391 OPS of .681 for a DH is pretty terrible, in fact of the 17 players to get 300 or more plate appearances at DH Pujols is in the bottom 3 in wRC+, OPS , isolated power, SLG, OBP and nearly everything else EXCEPT homers (9th) and RBI's (3rd)

RBI's are a team stat as the player has no control over the OBP ability of the hitters in front of him.


He's been pretty darn awful this year .

if you understand WAR it can 100% work that way.

"clutch" isn't a skill , there is no such thing as a clutch hitter in the long term. Hitting in high leverage situations tends to resemble hitting in all situations, of course in one season, it can vary wildly creating the illusion of "clutchiness" but the truth is the batter has no control over what happens before they come to the plate, so they don't get credit for it whenever they hit. So, WAR doesn't account for who was on base when you hit because you had nothing too do with it.


It's why RBI's are such a bad stat to judge hitting quality on. You didn't put those guys on base, you just got rewarded for getting a hit with them there.


now, just to clarify, CLUTCH situations exist, and guys will often come through in those individual situations above and beyond their normal ability. But there is no evidence that it exists as a skill for this player rather than the other player. It isn't a repeatable trait that lies above and beyond their normal hitting ability. good hitters tend t hit good, and bad hitters bad OVER THE LONG TERM. small sample sizes can skew our thinking and create confirmation and recency bias.


If you disagree, please present some evidence because there has been a ton of work done on it and so far, none has been found.

http://research.sabr.org/journals/th...clutch-hitting

I 100% agree with 2 things. I do not understand WAR and compared to his peak Pujols is having a bad year.:)

it's easy to learn, just go to the fangraphs.com page and go read their glossary it explains these stats in detail.


they are just statistics, like all others, not perfect (mostly because defense is so hard to quantify but it's getting better every year) of course, but no stat is perfect, they are better than the old baseball card stats tho.