With the playoffs approaching (the Minnesota Twins and Detroit Tigers have yet to decide their ultimate fate), our Player Profiles here at Intro to Sabermetrics are going to focus on some intriguing, playoff-bound players. And of course, with the New York Yankees in the playoffs again after missing the postseason last year, talk will once again come around about all the Yankee players, from the Captain Derek Jeter to the choke artist known as Alex Rodriguez.

A-Rod this season has been the same hitting machine he has been his entire career with the Yankees. Rodriguez suffered a hip injury and followed with a nice return made silly by a ridiculously low, sub-.200 batting average on balls in play (BABIP) that saw him post one of the more absurd batting lines in recent history. By the end of June, his BABIP sat .186, and by the All-Star Break it had grown up to .236. What’s odd is that despite that, A-Rod still had absurd numbers; at the All-Star Break, Rodriguez was still hitting .253/.411/.548, good for a mammoth .406 wOBA. At that point, he still had more walks (43 unintentional walks) than strikeouts (38).

After the All-Star Break, Rodriguez only hit 13 homers to follow his 17 prior to the break, constituting in the first season since 1997 that he has hit less than 35 home runs. Still, he’s put up another amazing offensive season, putting up a .406 wOBA according to StatCorner. Rodriguez has only come close or missed a .400 wOBA in three seasons, including this one. His 2004 and 2006 seasons with the Yankees range between slightly above or below a .400 mark (FanGraphs calculates wOBA slightly differently than StatCorner, and StatCorner has him barely making .400 on both seasons). In fact, since 2001, the start of this decade and the first season Rodriguez played for the Texas Rangers, Rodriguez trails only one man in terms of wOBA among players with over 5000 plate appearances.

It should be of no surprise that the only player who could surpass A-Rod in wOBA for this extended period of time is Albert Pujols. Rodriguez is closer to third place and Manny Ramirez than he is to Pujols, but this is nitpicking; the man is a two-time MVP and remains one of the best hitters in our generation.

Here’s where most people. particularly those New York media and at time fans, would say “Not when he gets to the playoffs!” Rodriguez seems to have a reputation for failure in the playoffs, except that this reputation has been overplayed to an extreme amount in New York. R.J. Anderson talked a bit about this over at FanGraphs last week, and I wanted to continue the conversation.

R.J. mentioned that A-Rod had a career postseason wOBA of .368. I decided to strip his Seattle seasons away, since his reputation has been mostly gained by his performance in New York. R.J. showed his slash values, which were very descriptive. Calculating Rodriguez’s wOBA for the 113 playoff PA with the Yankees, I got a value of .351, a solidly above average player. In comparison, the most revered Captain, Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter, has a .358 wOBA over those same postseason appearances in 116 PA. Jeter has six more singles, four fewer walks, and I gave him two reached on errors based on his past record of reaching on error, while giving Rodriguez none due to his declining speed. If I had given both players no ROEs, Jeter would have a wOBA of .342. Basically, these two players have been the same over that postseason period, and this postseason period is a sample size so small (about a sixth of a full season) that it’s impossible to tell whether either of these performances are indicative of skill or just random fluctuations.

Beyond that, let’s look at the clutch values for each of these players during that time period. Clutch, as it is defined on FanGraphs, is the difference between the Win Probability Added (WPA) with the full Leverage Index (LI) of any situation and the WPA calculated at an LI of 1 (WPA/LI). WPA/LI is a sort of custom linear weights model that gives different weights based on different base/out and inning states, but keeps the leverage at 1 so that each plate appearance weighs the same, while WPA weighs more important plate appearances more heavily. This is all to say that the difference between the two is representative of “clutch” wins. Clutch measures only high LI appearances; in other words, it only measures the “clutch” wins for the most important PAs of any game.

The results? In the four postseasons we are discussing, Rodriguez had a Clutch of 0.16 in total. Derek Jeter had a clutch score of -0.46, meaning that, when it counted the most, A-Rod actually outperformed Jeter in those four postseasons. During those regular seasons, Rodriguez had a Clutch of -0.87, while Jeter had a Clutch of 2.69, mostly on the back of an apparently extremely clutch 2006.

Clearly, Rodriguez is getting an unfair rap when it comes to the postseason “choke job” people claim he does. In his four Yankee postseasons, he’s been even with the great Cap’n Jetes in context neutral production and actually outperformed him in the clutch. So where is this vitriol coming from? Maybe it’s Rodriguez’s contract. Fans are expecting more from him because he’s being paid so much; A-Rod had better produce far more than Jeter because he makes so much more. Well, over those four seasons during which the Yankees made the postseason, Rodriguez made $12M more than Jeter and produced $39M more during the regular season than Jeter. Thanks to their respective salaries, Rodriguez was paid to produce 3.5 WAR more over the course of those four seasons than Jeter, and he turned in 10.6 WAR more.

If we took Jeter and A-Rod’s defensive contributions, both from UZR and positional adjustments, as equal over that timespan during the playoffs (and they were not, as A-Rod combined for 8.9 runs above average on defense, while Jeter was at -8.7 runs), we would expect Rodriguez to produce, based on the money he’s being paid above Jeter’s salary and the going free agent rates for each year, around one run better in about 113 plate appearances. He’s pretty much been even with Jeter offensively, so I’d say that’s a “Mission Accomplished.” And again, that doesn’t take into account the (admittedly small) differences in defensive value between the two over those four years.

I think it would be safe to say that A-Rod has done what he’s had to do in order to succeed in the Bronx, short of putting the team directly on his back and carrying them all the way to a World Series ring. It may seem a bit unfair to claim that Rodriguez is “unclutch” when the far more beloved Jeter has performed quite similarly. The salary question is also a poor one, at least when compared to Jeter’s salary; the truth of the matter is that both players are a good deal overpaid for what they do, and that’s why they’ve come out more than even in these measures. What can we expect from Rodriguez this postseason? Perhaps more of the same, perhaps performance equal to that of his in-season work, perhaps less; the postseason is sort of a crapshoot in that regard. For A-Rod’s sake, I hope he does well and takes the Yankees to another round, because if not, I feel the annoying chattering of ESPN “analysts” withering the offseason away with “unclutch” talk would shatter my mind (if I watched ESPN, that is).

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This entry was posted on Monday, October 5th, 2009 at 12:28 pm and is filed under Player Profile. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.