[attackemu]

Hey, everybody. I decided to put together a little study of the "clutch" rating in OOTP5, mostly prompted by my reading the article in the latest SI about the subject.

Moyer had a study posted about OOTP4 that reported that suffering in the clutch is more important than performing well in the clutch, but that it basically doesn't make a difference either way.

Here's what I did:

I created two teams, with identical rosters. The only differences were the clutch ratings for each individual player. Team "Clutch" had all GREAT clutch ratings and team "Suffers" had all suffers clutch ratings.

The rosters were taken by importing several players from the year 2000. They were honestly just the first people in their positions that came to my mind.

C Ivan Rodriguez
1B Jeff Bagwell
2B Roberto Alomar
SS Mike Bordick
3B Robin Ventura
LF Barry Bonds
CF Bernie Williams
RF Moises Alou

The starting rotations were made up of Shawn Estes and the bullpens were all Ugueth Urbina.

What I looked at in particular were how good clutch vs. bad clutch rated players performed in LIPS(Late Inning Pressure Situations) as compared to their normal performance. I know its not the best stat to use, but I used batting average to determine the difference.

I ran the teams through four 100 game replay schedules, with everything(injuries, finances, trades, minor leagues) turned off.


FIRST SEASON
Team Clutch hit on average .158 points better in LIPS than in normal situations. Team Suffers hit -.197 worse. That means that in pressure situations, Team Clutch hit .355 better than Team Suffers in LIPS.

SECOND SEASON
Clutch/Suffers/Difference
.307/-.387/.694

For some reason, this second season was a lot more varied.

THIRD SEASON
This was the really weird one.

C/S/D
-.303/.027/-.330

Not only did Team Suffers do better in LIPS, they did better overall than their normal batting averages(though not by much) while Team Clutch was significantly worse than average in LIPS.

FOURTH SEASON
C/S/D
-.086/-.381/.295

Once again, Team Clutch did worse than usual during LIPS, but Team Suffers did their normal much worse so it worked out alright.


OVERALL
On average, Team Clutch hit just .076 better in LIPS than in regular situations and Team Suffers hit .174 worse than usual. This seems to support the previous study that says suffering has more of an effect than being good.

As for Win-Loss Records, they went like this

Season 1
Clutch 54-46
Suffers 46-54

S2
C 46-54
S 54-46

S3
C 48-52
S 52-48

S4
C 54-46
S 46-54

Overall, the record over four seasons was 202-198 for clutch, 198-202 for suffers. Averaged out over four seasons, its a diffence of about a game a year.

So, ultimately, my study provides further evidence to Moyer's, I think, that clutch in OOTP has a negligable effect on team performance, but for late-inning situations, you don't so much want a good clutch hitter as you don't want a bad one.

Any questions or other data you want to see(ind. players or whatever), let me know.