Famously, baseball players aren’t clutch. They wilt under pressure. All of them. Every single one. They are all soft-spined disgraces who cannot handle the expectations of guys like me stomping around their living rooms asking the universe when Joe Kelly is being allowed into the game.
No, but actually: Baseball players aren’t clutch! There isn’t a lot of predictivity within “clutch” stats. In key situations, good players tend to be good, medium players tend to be medium, etc. Mookie Betts is great in October but he’s also great from April through September. If you made him play in January he’d be great then, too.
I don’t know if this is the case in all sports. I think it probably is, though I’m curious about the mental effects of being, say, the quarterback for the New York Jets. Does that break you? At least temporarily? And I’m curious about how elimination basketball changes things. In the NBA Playoffs, my perception is that stars take the ball more than in the regular season. Is that correct? I don’t know.
In baseball, specifically, though, the absence of consistent clutch performance doesn’t necessarily mean there isn’t a mental quality necessary to do one’s job well in the biggest moment. At least, I don’t think it does. Because something I think we don’t appreciate about baseball is how high-pressure it is even at the lowest levels.
Much of youth baseball features encounters with elimination games. Seasons are short. Tournaments are common. Many, including the global Little League World Series apparatus, are something like double-elimination. Youth baseball players play a lot of games with stakes, and within those games, inevitably, as a pitcher or hitter or fielder, the game would fall upon your shoulders. It happens to everyone. The coach’s kid. The star athlete at the high school. The right fielder batting eighth in the lineup who’d rather be playing video games. There might be crying in baseball, but there’s no hiding. Play long enough, even at rather recreational levels, and the game will consistently come down to you. The game’s nature is such that it falls upon individuals in its biggest moments, and the way the sport is set up for children and teens is such that there are stakes to a large proportion of games.
To succeed in baseball, then, even as a youth, you must withstand this pressure. You must perform when there are stakes. Which makes me wonder whether the real explanation behind the lack of exceptionally “clutch” performers isn’t that there are no clutch performers at the major league level, but instead is that every player who makes it big has to have been, for lack of a better term, “clutch” in their early days. To have made it this far, you need to have performed, and performing in baseball requires performing under pressure, because much of it occurs under pressure.
In other words: It’s not that no one is clutch. It’s that everybody is.
