I have seen many free throw shooters who could hit 70, 75% of shots in practice, but 45-50% in a game.  KU has one of them now, Udoke Azobuke.   He worked hard on his free throw shooting over the summer, came out in the first or second exhibition game and nailed 5 straight free throws, looked like he had beaten it.   But then he missed a couple, and immediately went back where he was.   I think it's a common thing.   I've had players tell me that EVERYBODY in baseball gets the yips about something sometime; it's just a question of whether you can work through it before other people start talking about it.   We had a catcher a couple of years ago who got the yips about throwing back to the pitcher, but he came out the next morning and threw back to the pitcher like 250 times, and beat it in one day.  People were very impressed with him, because he beat the yips in one day.   

Bowling would be another example of a "pure" environment.  Any situation in which the defense is not allowed to play defense, or the impact of defensive play is muted. 

The amount of clutch ability which COULD exist in baseball would be limited by the extent to which clutch ability exists in these "defense free" zones.  In other words, if you could measure what clutch ability is in these defense-free zones--it's probably zero, but I'll let you study it--but whatever it is there, it would have to be LESS than that in baseball, because in baseball the "true underlying skills" are always interacting with the forces of randomness, which are very powerful and which constantly blind us to the underlying realities.  

 Thanks.   Platoon advantage, being real, is routinely used as input into strategic decisions.  While some people may still believe in clutch hitting, no one believes in clutch hitting the way that everybody believed in clutch hitting in 1974.  

 Of course not.   You just draw three lines through the infield dirt; there has to be one player in the area defined by each set of lines at the time that the ball leaves the pitcher's hands.  In my view, the rule can't fail and cannot cause problems, because there is nothing complicated about it.  If is no more complicated than the rule saying that every fielder except the catcher has to be in fair territory when the ball is delivered.  Did you ever see that one cause problems?  

 

I'm not in favor of such a rule.   I just don't see what is complicated about it.  

 Only if you do bad things. 

 Consistent performance in high-leverage situations.  

Two sentences.  One of our member offered evidence that Clutch Hitting did not exist.  Our mistake was to accept the argument far too early in the debate, thus trapping ourselves into a position on the issue which may or more not be the better position.  

 Thanks.   Been working on a related essay. . . 

 I was aware that I was inventing a phrase, yes.  On reading the paragraph from a previous version I thought that the language was dull.  

I, on the other hand, will wind up dragging in 32 irrelevant topics, leaving some readers wishing they hadn't heard about that.  I do think it is important not to become too convinced too early that you have a topic figured out.   Clutch hitting is the worst example in our field.  We jumped the gun, reached a premature conclusion on faulty research, and created an issue for ourselves that plagued us for 40 years.  

 I don't think it is really questionable whether Carew is a Hall of Famer.  If he played now there would be more skepticism about his overall value as a player.  

 I wrote about it in the 2019 Handbook.   

 

 Yeah, but that's not it.  This is probably puzzling to people who didn't see the Twitter discussion, but. . .well, long series of problems there.  

 

(a)  You can't get south of the river, but north of Lawrence.   Lawrence goes to the river.  It always has; it was founded on the riverbank.  

 

(b)  I know what you are talking about with the "cutoff meander of the Lawrence River".  I actually own a good portion of that land now; it is not particularly valuable land, in that some of it floods in a flood year so you can't build on it and it is too rough to farm or anything.   People don't realize it is private land; there is a public path through it and people assume that the city owns it, but actually we own it; the deed says so.   

 

(c)  This is very clearly NOT the lake referred to in the 19th century newspapers.  It is extremely clear that that lake was on the north side of the river. 

 

(d)  Part of what you are missing is that the term "lake" did not have the common meaning then that it does now.   People referred to things that would now be called ponds as lakes; this is actually mentioned in The Man from the Train.  The lake we were trying to find is too small to be considered a lake in the modern usage of the term.  

 Maybe it explains why there were all of those 1-1-9 calls to your house.