I’m going to borrow from the laziest of tropes for speeches and articles and drop in a dictionary definition for the intro to this post:

clutch noun (DIFFICULT SITUATION)

US a difficult and important situation that needs a lot of skill to deal with successfully:


“This team was able to perform in the clutch every time,” he said.

He remained cool under pressure and made accurate throws in clutch situations.

The concept of ‘the clutch’ or ‘being clutch’ has come more and more interesting as analytics and sabermetrics play a larger part in player evaluation. On the one hand, less credence is being paid the the ‘eye test’ and the intangible qualities of a player, but on the other, as statistics advance and we delve further into what can be quantified, we are starting to put together some measurements that approach defining and judging a player’s ability to come through when it matters.

At the forefront of this is Win Probability Added (WPA), which has started to become a core statistic presented in many online box score graphics.

Per fangraphs, WPA:

Captures the change in Win Expectancy from one plate appearance to the next and credits or debits the player based on how much their action increased their team’s odds of winning.

…

WPA is terrific at telling the story of the game and the players who delivered in big situations. When did the winning team pull away? Who had the decisive hit? These are questions WPA can answer

It doesn’t tell you how well a player performed, it tells you how important their performance was.

Baseball is an excellent sport to hone in on the concept of ‘clutch’, partly because WPA has leant an element of objectivity to the debate on the nature of clutch, but also because the position of closer is at the absolute vanguard of the debate that swirls around the value of ‘high leverage’ moments.

Recent years have seen fierce arguments crop up over whether closers have been overvalued for years in both the trade and free agent markets, with the common line of discourse being offered up that players who potentially appear in a 10th of the number of innings (or fewer) than their peers should not be earning comparable salaries. The overall shift in focus to statistics-based analysis would naturally diminish the impact of a closer. If a starting pitcher has gone 8 innings and therefore got 24 outs, why should the guy who happens to come in for the final 3 be rewarded the same way.

It is at this point that WPA provides a bridge between the world of statistics and the world of “Bro – we’ve got to pay him, the guy is CLUTCH”.

The poster boy for the suggestion that there is a statistical element that demonstrates the value of the closer and proves the impact they deserve recompense for is Mariano Rivera. While he is almost unilaterally a statistical outlier across the board, his excellence still provides a useful stake in the ground from which we might be able to measure others.

An excellent ESPN article provided a series of statistical nuggets, my favourite of which is this:

[Rivera] has the most win probability added in postseason history, and this one’s a doozy: Rivera’s postseason WPA is 11.7. The next-highest player had 4.1 WPA. The highest by a hitter — of all the hitters in history! — is 3.2. Rivera, in fact, had more WPA than the second-, third- and fourth-best postseason careers put together.

So a guy who rarely throws more than an inning or 2 blows the rest of his peers out of the water when it comes to his contribution to his team’s chances of winning, and the context we are looking at is the sharp end of the season, so these stats are not even adjusted for the fact that a WPA of 1 in the first game of a 162 game season being very different from a WPA of 1 in the final game of the playoffs. Rivera’s statistical domination of postseason WPA demonstrates that he consistently came through when it mattered. Does Mariano Rivera prove that if a player is “clutch” enough then he can add significant value? And were Mo to magically reappear as a 20-something rookie, how would the dominoes fall on the debate over his merit to his team?

If you were to look up the lists of the most infamous blown saves in history, our man Mo will almost likely feature at number 1 in allowing the game-winning hit in game 7 against the Diamondbacks. Additionally, there will still be a fair few people that still maintain that despite the historic nature of his WPA stats, he is still just a closer and therefore his overall value remains limited.

It is here that we spring off our stepping stone of WPA, and look back in the distance at sabermetrics, from our new vantage point firmly in the intangibles.

Rivera was one of a number of players that made up the modern dynasty of the New York Yankees who were consistently excellent for the best part of a decade or more. I do not believe it is a coincidence that within this team they had an absolute rock upon which they could rely on in Mariano Rivera. However much statistical analysis attempts to introduce a clinical and emotionless approach to the sport, it remains the case that baseball is played by humans, and those humans have human emotions, feelings and flaws.

I have already written of my admiration for the psychological side of baseball.

Mariano Rivera’s nickname was “The Sandman”, and he entered too the foreboding strains of the eponymous song by Metallica. He was notorious for his cutter, which buzzed in on batters’ hands and cut through their bats like they were nothing.

It can in no way be underestimated how powerful those things going through a batter’s mind are when he is stood at the bat facing the pitcher. Statistics will never get inside a player’s head, and provide a “Psychological Wins Above Replacement” (PWAR), so it will never be possible to measure this – but if you were to ask the majority of the players who faced Mo over his big league career how much they would want their execs to pay to have him on their team rather than the opposition, you’d be quoted back something well above what he ended up earning.

Herein lies the intangible value of “clutch” and the power of the ideology of the closer’s role. It has been written countless times how illogical it is for managers to continue saving their best pitcher for the 9th inning when the 8th may be when the game is at its most critical moment. But to have your closer trot out in the 8th inning does something to detract from the psychological power of him stepping out ceremonially as “THE guy” in the 9th inning.

As a Braves fan, I got the experience the thrill of our own version of Rivera, when Craig Kimbrell was at his height, and he rocked and rolled on the mound before throwing down nearly 100mph heat to a batsman who surely walked out knowing he was overmatched. There is no doubt an intrinsic value to a team knowing that going into the final inning of a game, if they have a lead they’re going to win.

Of course if you flip that same scenario around, you can easily see the value of a great closer who owns “the clutch” when you subtract that very thing from a team. I will come back to the concept that not all wins and losses are created equally – game 1 of the regular season vs game 7 of the World Series being a classical example. But the other main element to consider when looking at the value of clutch is how a team loses.

If you go 2-4 behind after the third inning and play out 6 more uneventful innings, then it is pretty likely that game will be forgotten pretty quickly. Now if your team is 2-0 up with 2 outs in the bottom of the 9th and your closer gives up a grand slam, that’s a very different kind of loss. Both box scores may say 2-4, but the impact and value to your team of those two games is very different indeed.


If you stack up a few walk-off losses in a short space of time, whatever statistics and analysis might show pale into insignificance when you consider the human element of the game. If a batter is stepping up to the plate on the top of the 9th knowing that he has the near-immortal Mo Rivera coming in for his side to close out the bottom, there is no way that he won’t have an extra ounce or two of force powering through his arms as he swings that bat. Equally, if that same batter has Johnny Noname of 3 blown saves in his last 4 outings to follow, would that not sap something of his enthusiasm, knowing his best efforts are most likely going to be futile.

This for me is the real, actualised value of a closer – it isn’t so much the value you get out of having one, it is the value you lose when you don’t have one you can rely on.

If this description of a player’s value resonates with you, you may very well be a fan of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers or the San Diego/LA Chargers. Both of these teams have experienced that same feeling when it comes to the kickers that their teams have wheeled out in the NFL.


The role of the kicker is one that is definitely unenvious – whereas their closer counterparts in MLB are still being paid significantly, modern kickers will likely go through their careers with a relatively stingy pay packet (in NFL terms). Added to this is the fact that they are doing a job that the average NFL fan will likely think he could take a realistic shot at. While the average baseball fan would in no way think they have a chance of getting Mike Trout out, I would guess the majority of fans would back themselves in kicking a 30-yard field goal. To wrap up the life of a kicker, you must also factor in the fact that with the odd exception of a botched snap and hold, any failure for him to convert lies solely at his own feet and no-one else’s. It may be a team game, but kicking is a lonely, lonely job.

The status of kickers in the NFL is one of great contrasts. One the one hand you have the 46-year old grey bearded Adam Vinatieri. On the other you have Roberto Aguayo, drafted 59th overall in 2016 and waived and out of the league altogether 2 years later.

Kickers live and die in the clutch, and as they go, so their teams go with them. Everything that I have already described as being key in the role of a closer is amplified in a kicker. Their perceived diminished value in the scarcity with which they are actually involved in a game are juxtaposed and offset by the significance of the moments that they appear in. Whereas a closer blowing a couple of games in a 162 game season may be significant, it pales into insignificance when you consider that an NFL season is only 16 games long. When we get into the playoffs, the one-and-done nature of the NFL postseason throws an even starker light on the games that come down to the swing of a kickers leg.

The aforementioned Aguayo is a cautionary tail for teams chasing that solution to the question of the clutch. The Patriots found their solution twice, with both Vinatieri and then Gostkowski proving themselves to be nigh on automatic, whereas the Ravens have a genuine offensive weapon in the shape of Justin Tucker. Where the clutch performance of an NFL kicker becomes more significant than that of an MLB closer is in the decisions that their managers can make. While a manager may decide to pull an individual player out of the “official” role, he cannot remove the role altogether – ultimately if his team is leading in the middle of the 9th, he has to send a pitcher of some kind out in the bottom of the inning to close things out. Good, bad or ugly, someone fills the role.

In the NFL things take on a slightly different dimension, and the value of a player who can come through for you at the business end of things can genuinely make or break your whole team.


If you are just approaching mid-field and you are down by 2 points, everyone on that team knows how they feel about their kicker. They know where that virtual line bisects the turf, where they need to get to in order to give themselves a chance to win. So when your quarterback makes that throw, but you come up a yard short, there is a huge decision to be made.

If you have a Tucker or a Gostkowski on your sideline, you can all rest pretty easy with the decision to call out the kicking unit and leave that moment in the clutch up to him.

If you have Johnny McNobody swinging at the practice net, you might just take your shot at the hail mary instead.

Objectively one of those two scenarios is more likely to get you victory, so we see here where having a guy who can come through for you when it matters is truly key. If you trust him to see you right, and get the job done then you probably make the better decision on paper. If you just cannot see your guy getting it done in the clutch, you end up having to make the decision you know is the worse one.

For me, it is this scenario excellently exhibits the fickle and complicated nature of the clutch, and why we will never be able to stop debating on whether or not it is a thing, and if it is whether we can measure someone’s ability in such moments. Whether it is the psychological power exerted by a flamethrowing closer, or the reassurance in playing the percentages a metronomic kicker gives you, the clutch really does give us the moments when the tangible and intangible come together in the instants that transform sport for the ordinary to the extraordinary.