All clutch team attempt - thoughts?

$110m cap, DH league. I am in South Side Park (9,9/6,6)

http://onlinegames.strat-o-matic.com/team/818738

I know quite a few have created teams on the All Clutch concept, but this is my first. I started with an ideal goal of 100 positive clutch points for my 9 starting hitters, although I expected not to reach that. I ended up with 85 vs LHP and 80 vs RHP. My bench is also all positive clutch, 32-31 respectively. In attempting to get as many positive clutch points as possible, I have forgone hitters with better cards, in favor of the clutch. The key, of course, is whether my guys will be on base enough to create the clutch situations where the positive clutch rolls can possibly come in to play. BTW, the three other parks in my division are two lefty leaning parks and a slugging park. As a secondary goal, I tried to get as many minus Hold ratings as I could among my 9 pitchers, although I wasn't as hard corp about it. 7 have - Hold ratings, while two have +1 each. The 7 with minus ratings total a -14 total. Anyway, for all you positive clutch fans, what do you think? I confess, I almost never pay attention to clutch value. But I am using this team as my own experiment.

http://onlinegames.strat-o-matic.com/team/811678

$70 million league
My team was all + clutch and all 1's.
15 hits in clutch situations.
They won it all!

My gut tells me these teams do better in smallball, especially when there are other smallball parks IN your division.

Anything is possible though...

Good luck.

It doesn't seem like clutch situations come up often enough over a full season to make that much of a difference. That was kind of a shocker, actually, when they started making the clutch stats available -- I thought it happened more frequently.

I can't imagine "clutch" being the main thing around which you build a team, and having it work. But it would be cool if I'm completely wrong!

I agree with Tomwistar- don't think that clutch situations come up enough to make much of a difference one way or another. I recently had a team with 99 wins that didn't have a single clutch hit all season (and 15 outs), and my last title team also had zero clutch hits.

I rarely use clutch as a make-or-break factor in deciding whether to use a player-- instead, it's more of a secondary consideration in choosing the lineup.

If you're basing a team on it, I would think that you would maximize your opportunities in a singles-heavy environment like Royals or Forbes 57. A neutral singles park will slightly reduce the number of baserunners, and with it, the number of clutch opportunities. In any event, it should make for an interesting experiment (as would a team with heavy anti-clutch numbers).

I agree.

As you can see from my squad, I played in Forbes '09.

IDK how many times those clutch situations helped me win a game.
They do keep an inning alive though.

I was throwing the idea around with Valen awhile back about a league.
Smallball stadiums, + vs. - clutch teams.

Simply looking at the number of clutch hits/outs on the stats page I think is misleading. If you watch the replays, you can see it affects a number of HAL's decisions around intentional walks. I haven't done it in a long time, but when I made clutch smallball teams in the past, they usually did really well. You need lots of speed, and bunting/h&r ability is a bonus also.

Personally I don't like the use of clutch, because it's sole purpose is to keep RBI numbers in line with real life numbers. It has nothing to do with actual clutch ability. So in general a power hitter with 90 RBI will get penalized with a negative clutch over a slap hitter with 80 RBI, even though the power hitter might have played on a crappy team with poor hitters around him and the slap hitter was batting behind Ty Cobb. But hey, it's there and it adds another level of strategy.

I can't imagine "clutch" being the main thing around which you build a team, and having it work. But it would be cool if I'm completely wrong!

Agree with you Tom, here is a link to a 94 win team that is going into the playoffs tonight, 3-30 in clutch situations, out of a total of just under 6000 ABs, Shumpert with 5 being the most that any one player had.

Using Shumpert as an example (he bats 3rd in my lineups):

On his card, he had $ on 2-3-8-10 vs L and 2-6-10-12-12 vs R, or ELEVEN chances on each side out of 108 total chances.

So basically Shumpert has a 10% chance of a clutch symbol. Even with a 10% chance, the $ only had an affect on the result five times in the entire season out of 562 ABs, or less that 1% of the results.

As a team, there were 30 clutch affected results, out of 6000 ABs, which is .5% (yes 1/2 of 1 percent).

http://onlinegames.strat-o-matic.com/team/misc/813778

As my accounting buddies would say, de minimis. Actually I don't have any accounting buddies, I am a strat addict, but not THAT much of a nerd...LOL

Maybe you could settle for positive clutch from every card in the lineup instead of going for maximum clutch points. Trying to max out the clutch points severely reduces your player pool.

Thanks for all the feedback, guys. Your thoughts that clutch isn't that relevant is what I have always thought, as well. But, I decided to experiment with this team to prove/disprove it to myself.

Okay
I am stillnew to this and I enjoy the game. I know I still need to learn more but I do not see clutch rating in the stats.