David Leonhardt in the New York Times discusses a recent article in The Baseball Research Journal by Bill James. In the article, Bill argues that a method used to evaluate if clutch hitters exist is not a viable method.

All “real” skills in baseball (or anything else) are persistent at least to some extent. Intelligence, bicycle riding, alcoholism, income-earning capacity, height, weight, cleanliness, greed, bad breath, the ownership of dogs or llamas and the tendency to vote Republican . . . all of these are persistent phenomena. Everything real is persistent to some measurable extent. Therefore, if something cannot be measured as persistent, we tend to assume that it is not real.

Bill argues that too much noise in the data makes measuring of persistence of certain statistics nearly impossible. One thing I love about Bill is that if he feels he made a mistake in doing research, he comes right out and says it, and this is one of those articles. Mind you, he's not saying that clutch ability exists; he's saying that persistence studies can't prove that it doesn't exist.

Here's his conclusion about clutch hitting:

On (1), it is my opinion that this should be regarded as an open question. While Dick Cramer is a friend of mine, and I have tremendous respect for his work, I am convinced that, even if clutch-hitting skill did exist and was extremely important, this analysis would still reach the conclusion that it did, simply because it is not possible to detect consistency in clutch hitting by the use of this method.

So there you have it. Clutch hitting is an open question. Sounds like a great research project for a budding sabermetrician!

One thing I've noticed during my research time is that when I did long term studies of players hitting overall vs. hitting in various situations, the same players tended to cluster together, only in different orders. At the end of 2003 (when I still had access to STATS, Inc. database of situational hitting from 1974 to the present), I looked at slugging percentage with runners in scoring position from 1974-2003. The top 25 in that list were the same as the top 25 for overall slugging percentage from 1974-2003, just in a different order (I believe it was based on a minimum of 5000 overall AB). A study along those lines for batting average or OBA would go a long way toward showing the existence or non existence of this ability.