Clutch Hitters and Choke Hitters
Myth or Reality?


Thanks to a study undertaken in May 2005, by University of Pennsylvania student Elan Fuld, we can now be certain that clutch hitters (and for that matter choke hitters) really do exist.

Fuld, a life-long fan of the game, studied the phenomenon of clutch hitting in baseball. His calculations provided statistical evidence that players such as Eddie Murray, Frank Duffy and Luis Gomez were clutch hitters. A surprising finding in the study was that Bill Buckner, who has gone down in history as one of the game's worst "chokers" for his Game 6 World Series error, was statistically proven to be a clutch hitter.

The premise. Fuld defined a clutch hitter as a batter who hits better at more important times in a game. He modeled the at-bat outcomes of players using the importance of the game situation to find out if clutch or choke abilities helped to explain their performance.

"Once situational importance rose to around at least a certain level, the player would start to think this is very important and start doing something that makes him hit better, if he's clutch, or panic and does something that makes him hit worse, if he's a choke hitter," Fuld said.

"Sports announcers are always talking about who is a clutch hitter and who is a choke hitter. So I did a research project to determine whether there was statistical evidence for the existence of clutch hitters in Major League Baseball."

The study. Fuld studied playing statistics of 1,075 major league players between the 1974-1992 seasons. He determined the situational importance of a player's at-bat based on:

  • A team's lead.
  • Which bases were occupied.
  • How many outs there were in the game.
  • Which half-inning it was.

    He used six sets of assumptions that involved sacrifice flys and errors in different ways, allowing for only a 1 percent chance of a player showing up as a clutch or choke hitter if he was not.

    The findings. "What I found was that, when I included sacrifice flys in the analysis, there was overwhelming evidence that there were clutch hitters," said Fuld, a math and economics major from Brookline, Massachusetts.

    Source: Penn News

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