Clutch and Overall Performance in Major League Baseball (MLB)

In 2003 the book Moneyball was published—upending many long held beliefs about how to place a value on the performance of major league baseball players in North America. In the years that followed Moneyball's publication, every major league baseball team installed its own analytics department, impacting how team managers recruited and remunerated players. In this case, students—both those familiar with American baseball and those who are not—will gain insight into the importance of "clutch"—i.e., how a player performs in critical game situations when their performance matters most. Data is provided, in accompanying excel spreadsheets, for students to build their own models to determine how to measure clutch performance, whether it is a repeatable skill, and how to predict a player's ability to positively impact a game's score when he is at bat.