> Let me ask you a simple question. Do the great teams win close games? Since I don't have the stats at hand I can't answer but they do win games that are close. (They may also win non-close games but the key is that they win when the games are tight near the end. Tied or down one run in the 7th inning the great teams find a way to win).
I'll answer the rest of your post later, but I had to get this since I sort of baited you into it. See, Bob, this is the difference between your approach and mine. What you are saying sounds reasonable. Everything you said sounds reasonable. _It's just not true_. Take a look at your beloved 1998 Yankees. IIRC, they were about .500 in one-run games. They weren't even close to their overall winning percentage. Great teams never are. What they won were blowouts. Great teams win the blowouts, and break even in the tight games. But one-run games come down to luck. So either your beloved Yankees were sucky clutch players during the regular season but somehow magically learned how to do it in the postseason - or luck happens. Personally, I think the second explanation is a lot more plausible. I don't believe there are clutch players in the majors. There's a fairly obvious reason why. In order to get to the majors a player has had to face a numberless array of extremely high pressure situations. The ones who choked never made it in the first place, or didn't stick when they did make it. _Every player in the majors does well in the clutch_. Pitchers as well as hitters. So it cancels out. If players _did_ do well in the clutch it would be consistent from season to season, right? But it isn't. Players who do extremely well with runners in scoring position one season will do extremely poorly the next. _If being clutch were real, then it would not be random from season to season, but it is_. It's different from basketball or football because baseball is a game of calm, not adrenaline. If you play baseball in a rage with your teeth gritted, you'll just be bad at it. If you do that in football you're fairly typical. You've clearly watched baseball games back to the dead ball era, Bob, and I'm really impressed that you personally helped Abner Doubleday lay out the base paths in Cooperstown :-) You clearly know more about baseball than I do. But, as I think I demonstrated by asking the question above, some of the stuff you know _isn't true_. And those things you know that aren't true damage your analysis. The virtue of statistical analysis of this type is that you can be very, very confident that everything you know is true. Gautam
