David Ortiz rescued the Red Sox postseason hopes Sunday night with a dramatic game-tying grand slam in the bottom of the eighth inning. Boston would score again in the ninth to walk off with a win and stun the Tigers.
It was a familiar scene: Ortiz, his team in dire need of a spark, clobbering a pitch to lift Boston to victory. Unsurprisingly, most everyone hailed the slam as more proof that Ortiz is synonymous with the word "clutch." Red Sox owner John Henry even presented Ortiz in 2005 with a plaque that proclaimed him "the greatest clutch hitter in the history of the Boston Red Sox."
The numbers, however, don't quite bear this out.
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First, it's worth nothing that there's a spirited debate about whether or not clutch hitting even exists. Some point to heroics like Ortiz's grand slam — or Kirk Gibson's limping home run, or Carlton Fisk's shot off the foul pole — as proof there is. Others claim it's mostly statistical noise. Nate Silver neatly summed up the latter argument in a Baseball Prospectus essay years ago, saying it was probably real, though minimally so, and that it "may really be situational hitting" — say, a good hitter knowing when and how to place a single or swing for the fences.
Returning to Ortiz, Fangraphs has a very handy stat for evaluating clutch performances, called, imaginatively enough, "Clutch." Without getting too lost in the math, Clutch compares a player's overall performance versus his performance in high-leverage situations, when a positive outcome has more impact on the outcome of the game. A Clutch score of zero equates to the league average, with 2.0 being "excellent" and -2.0 being choke city.
For his career, Ortiz has a -0.29 Clutch score. To put it plainly, he's been below average when it matters most. That number is heavily weighed down by years like 2007, when Ortiz posted a terrible -1.71 Clutch.
"But wait," you may be saying to yourself. "Wasn't Ortiz a total boss in 2007?"
He was! Ortiz hit .332/.445/.621 with 35 home runs and finished fourth in the AL MVP voting. His problem was that he did the bulk of his damage in low-stakes environments.
Where most people remember Ortiz coming up big, though, is in the playoffs. And indeed, there he has had his moments.
Over 72 career playoff games, Ortiz has a 1.04 Clutch score. In one of his more memorable moments in a Red Sox uniform, he launched a walk-off home run in the bottom of the twelfth inning to end Game 4 of the 2004 ALCS — the first of four straight wins in Boston's historic return from an 0-3 series hole against the Yankees.
Ortiz hit an insane .400 that postseason, blasted five home runs, and got on base more than half the time he came to the plate to help carry Boston to its first World Series title in 86 years. It's those kinds of performances that cemented his image as a great clutch hitter.
However, Ortiz's overall October production is hardly any different from what he's done in the regular season.
Ortiz has a career wRC+ — a comprehensive, weighted measure of overall offensive production where 100 is average — of 138. In the postseason, he's been minimally better, at 141. His batting average, on-base percentage, and output in virtually every other offensive stat are almost identical across regular and postseason play, too. And while he's averaged one home run per 19.1 plate appearances in the regular season, he's averaged one per 21 in the playoffs.
You could make a strong case for the postseason being the better place to evaluate how clutch a player is. For the bulk of Ortiz's career, though, he's hardly been the "greatest clutch hitter in in the history of the Boston Red Sox." That title, per Clutch scores, goes to former second baseman and current Boston TV announcer Jerry Remy.
Ortiz, meanwhile, ranks 32nd.
