NEWSLETTER
Jason Heyward’s recent resurgence has been thoroughly examined over the past few weeks, and, at this point in time, there’s nothing new to add to the conversation that we haven’t already discussed. He is still doing quite well overall, has been hotter over the last month and a half or so, and is maintaining a strong peripheral foundation, inspiring confidence for the medium term.
But as I traversed the magical world of the FanGraphs leaderboards – searching for that perfectly unique, slightly unexpected, immensely positive, Cubs-related statistical nugget to tweet – I stumbled on something that was, well, exactly that:
Ready for a good one?
JASON HEYWARD has been the SEVENTH most clutch hitter in baseball this season, according to his 0.94 @fangraphs Clutch rating.
— Michael Cerami (@Michael_Cerami) July 2, 2018
If you’re unaware, FanGraphs has developed an actual statistic – appropriately named clutch – to measure how well a player has performed in high leverage situations. You can read all about it here, but the short version is that clutch measures “how much better or worse a player does in high leverage situations than he would have done in a context neutral environment.” It’s one of those statistics that is exclusively useful for describing past performance not predicting future success and it’s also one of those where “0” is average, negative numbers are below average, and positive numbers are better than average.
For a little reference, FanGraphs considers a 2.0 clutch score excellent, a 1.0 clutch score great, 0.5 above average, 0 average, -0.5 below average, -1.0 poor, and -2.0 awful. Last season, only one player finished with a score above 2.0 and only 21 players finished with a score above 1.0.
SO, as you can probably imagine, I was pleasantly surprised to find Heyward currently sitting with a 0.94 clutch score. Sure, he’s been performing better lately and yes, that number can still go down, but he’s been pretty elite-ly talented in the most high leverage situations and I thought that was fun to consider:
Clutch Leaderboard
- Brian Anderson: 1.52
- Freddy Galvis: 1.50
- Jean Segura: 1.23
- Andrew Benintendi: 1.13
- Brett Gardner: 1.09
- Kyle Seager: 1.08
- Jason Heyward: 0.94
- Alex Bregman: 0.89
- Nelson Cruz: 0.86
- Dee Gordon: 0.86
So just how good has Heyward done in high leverage situations? Well, we’re not talking about a ton of opportunities here (he’s had just 23 high leverage plate appearances (Joey Votto leads the Majors in chances with twice that)), but during those 23 chances, he’s been very, very good: .412/.500/.706.
And that obviously includes his walk-off grand slam from last month.
All together, that’s four singles, two doubles, a homer, four walks, and just one strikeout in those 23 plate appearances. Better yet, he’s turned those seven hits and four walks into 12 RBI and nine runs. That’s impressive. Among players with at least 20 high leverage plate appearances, Heyward’s 214 wRC+ ranks 16th overall (Gleyber Torres ranks first … sorry, sorry, trying to delete).
Funny enough, Ian Happ’s 240 wRC+ in 23 high leverage plate appearances ranks 7th and Ben Zobrist’s 14 RBI is tied for 10th with Joey Votto. So together, these three Cubs have been the clutch kings – not, as you might otherwise expect, Kris Bryant, Anthony Rizzo, Javy Baez, or Willson Contreras.
As we’ve said throughout this post, there’s usually no connection between clutch performance in the past carrying forward into the future (most guys just always regress to their career averages when given enough time), but that doesn’t mean this isn’t a fun revelation about what has already happened. Jason Heyward hasn’t just turned things around this season, he’s made his hits count and then some.
That’s a sure-fire way to get back in the good graces of Cubs fans everywhere.
