Donaldson might be proof clutch hitters exist
CHICAGO— John Gibbons likes to say Josh Donaldson has a “knack” for coming up big when the moment demands it, as if it were an intrinsic part of his character.
The Blue Jays third baseman has certainly given his manager ample evidence: he already has a pair of walk-off homers, while a full two-thirds of his team-leading 21 home runs this season have either tied the game or given the Jays the lead, as they did on Monday and Tuesday night. Game-changing hits have been a hallmark of the 29-year-old’s still-nascent career, with more than half of his 84 career home runs being tying or go-ahead blasts.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” Donaldson told the Star recently when presented with the stats. He said he prepares the same way for every at-bat, regardless of the situation in the game. “I try to approach every situation as if it’s a clutch situation. I don’t think, ‘Oh, I’m really going to try hard this time.’ You don’t want to do that. If you start doing that, you won’t succeed.”
But Donaldson isn’t the only one who has come through in the clutch this season. The Jays have the majors’ secondhighest on-base-plus-slugging (OPS) percentage in “high-leverage” situations (moments when a lead could change hands, which typically equates to about 20 per cent of plays inside a given game) this year at .841, which is 68 points higher than their mark in low- and medium-leverage situations.
The Jays have changed more games with their bats than any other team this year, leading the majors in Win Probability Added — a statistic that measures how each individual play increases or decreases a team’s chances of winning — by a wide margin while hitting more “highleverage” homers than any other team.
So are the Jays full of clutch hitters or just good hitters? They do lead the majors in runs scored by a margin of nearly 80, so it should come as no surprise that they also hit well when the game is on the line.
Statistical analysts have studied the notion of clutch hitting in baseball exhaustively and reached a near consensus that while there may be clutch hits, there is no such thing as a clutch hitter. It is not a skill that correlates from year to year. Baseball Prospectus writer Russell A. Carleton threw a wrench into the existing research last year, however, when he found that some hitters swung more often in highleverage situations and those that did performed slightly better.
Sport psychologist Paul Dennis said not all elite athletes can perform in high-pressure situations, and those that do are better able to focus in order to rise above the added distractions when the game is on the line. “I think the No. 1 reason for that is they trust themselves,” Dennis said. “They have enormous trust in their ability. Secondly they think less and are able to focus on the relevant cues.”
Dennis said brain scans of elite athletes who have had success in highpressure situations show far less neural activity in stressful situations than others. “Those that can’t perform in those situations, their brain scans are lit up like a Christmas tree.”
It’s “virtually impossible” for an athlete to imagine a situation different than what he or she is in, Dennis said, but they can isolate their focus strictly to the task. He says this is learned behaviour, not innate.
“I think at a very early age they experienced success and they like what it feels like, especially if it was a pressure situation, so they embrace that,” he said. “They may have been nervous — every athlete is nervous — but they interpret that as being facilitative, as in ‘I love the challenge, I’m not afraid of failure.’ That starts at an early age.”
Donaldson agreed with that point, at least. “I understand that failure is part of the game,” he said. “But I think a big part of it is I don’t want to let that guy beat me.”