SI.com – Writers – Verducci’s Mailbag: Indians stood their ground – Thursday April 8, 2004 6:13PM

SI.com – Writers – Verducci’s Mailbag: Indians stood their ground – Thursday April 8, 2004 6:13PM

I was just reading the Sports Illustrated Baseball Preview Issue, with it’s big Stats takeout. The problem is that so much of the info is so 1984, which is when Bill James invented much of this stuff, that it’s hard to take seriously.

But then you read Verducci’s story about clutch hitting and realize he’s evaluating the ability to hit in the clutch by using batting average! That’s so 1983!

I don’t know that using SLG or OPS would change the results (the way they did disputing Voros McCracken’s contention that pitchers don’t control batter outcomes on balls in play), but if you’re going to spend many pages talking about the validity of OBP and OPS and SLG and their advantage over AVG, don’t you think you should use them to look at clutch hitting?