Just back from the coffee shop where I sat and read this in the print edition. It cheered me up a bit, which I needed.
Clutch hitting is a murkier area, for me, than the "hot hand," which most obviously exists. James's mature disillusionment with the truth-divining potential of baseball statistics strikes me as inevitable and a good thing. There's long been an irony, by turns delicious or irritating, when self-important "well-informed" baseball fans deploy a superstitious confidence in the interpretation of numbers to belittle the more self-consciously (and honestly) superstitious managers, players, beat writers, radio personalities, etc. A lot of good has come out of the study of advanced metrics, for certain, but to some extent their most alluring uses - e.g., projection - are little more than a modern-day alchemy. Too much faith in one projection system or one overall value measure is no better than too much faith in the good that comes from not stepping on the white line when you take to the field.
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