Archive of SportingNews.com's old SOM Baseball forum

How important is the clutch rating? A few players really choke in clutch situations due to the $ markers. I'm curious how important this is when evaluating a card? Obviously a guy like Austin Jackson should never bat anything but leadoff or 9th... but how deadly is his clutch ratings over the course of a season?

Most people believe it isn't much of a factor and I both agree and disagree. In my opinion the Clutch rating is tremendously important if the particular player has a large positive or negative amount. I just won a title by buying low cost players with large positive clutch ratings. People thought the team would fail to contend but it ended up winning it all and probably causing over 30 blown saves. If a player has only one clutch symbol and it is on a 11 or 12 then it doesn't matter as that is only a 1 or 2 out of 108 difference. Look at my roster:

http://fantasygames.sportingnews.com/stratomatic/team/team_other.html?user_id=362364

Look at the cards for Canseco, Rose, Gary Ward, Bob Horner, and Ray Knight. All of those players gain a ton of dice rolls in clutch situations. Tony Gwynn and Willie Randolph lose a ton. I had to make my lineup accordingly. I wanted the clutch players in spots where they logically would be up in clutch situations as much as possible. Ray Knight batted 5th vs Lefties for me as an example while I hid Willie Randolph first.

If you notice almost all of my players performed up to their expectations doing this including players like Ray Knight who people say you can only platoon with. Ray Knight has a ton of clutch symbols and if you bat him lower in the order after some high OBP and K hitters a lot of those AB's were clutch AB's for Knight and his overall performance against RHP was adequate and saved me a lot of money not needing a platoon partner.

Pete Rose as a pinch hitter actually has a good card. He gains like 14 dice rolls in clutch spots vs RHP making him go from below average to very good. I had solid production using him that way.

I batted Tony Gwynn 3rd and I estimate he had at least 20 hits he lost due to his clutch symbol. He isn't ideal for the 3 hole but I had no choice based on my roster. He also still had a high level of positive dice rolls even after you subtract the clutch factor so I left him there. He drove in 113 runs so it wasn't all bad.

Gary Ward didn't have a great clutch season but he drove in 19 runs in 12 playoff games as the odds finally came through for me. He still hit close to .300 in the season batting primarily 5th or 6th.

If you want to bat a hitter in the middle of the order you need to subtract the negative dice rolls out and calculate if he is still a good hitter in those situations. I don't play 2010 but I think it is Jayson Werth that sticks out as somebody I would avoid because of his terrible clutch rating. I couldn't pay that much for somebody I had to hide in my lineup.

This is the same as clutch hitting in real life. If a hitter bats .300 normally but he hits .230 in clutch spots that gets talked about. If your .230 hitter bats .300 in clutch spots that is big news too.

So in the end if your player gains or loses more than 6 dice rolls due to clutch rating then I would adjust his spot in the order accordingly.

My new team has terrible clutch ratings and I'm curious to see how the season plays out. Most of the guys have really high BA's so even after subtracting dice rolls due to clutch ratings I think they will hit okay. But if they were lower BA guys I would be really worried.

http://fantasygames.sportingnews.com/stratomatic/team/team_other.html?user_id=376484

This time I will bat Gwynn leadoff due to his terrible clutch ratings. Boggs has a negative rating but he has so many hits on his card I'm still gonna bat him 3rd. Jim Rice is similar. I'm hoping Phillips positive clutch rating will matter as on this team he will be up in clutch spots probably close to 1/4 of the time, because of this I'm not platooning him and hoping he will bat around .255 or higher vs RHP. Pat Tabler has about as bad a clutch rating as you can have so I am batting him 2nd vs RHP to hide him. I hide Espinoza in the 2 hole vs LHP for the same reason. Lynn has a positive rating and Ortiz's rating is pretty meaningless as it is only -3.