MLB

The 2014 MLB All-Clutch Team

The word clutch is used a lot to describe players, but who are really the most clutch players in baseball this year?

The word clutch is tossed around a lot when talked about baseball players. Joey Votto and Miguel Cabrera are said to be clutch. Alex Rodriguez isn't, especially in the playoffs.

Clutch is how a player preforms in high-pressure situations. If a player hits a walk-off home run with two outs in the bottom of the ninth, they're clutch. If they strike out with the bases loaded, they're not.

But who really is clutch? Is Miguel Cabrera clutch? Is Alex Rodriguez not? Thankfully, FanGraphs has a nifty clutch stat, which you can read more about here. The gist of it is that clutch is "how much better or worse a player does in high leverage situations than he would have done in a context neutral environment." So if a player strikes out in a high-pressure situation, whereas they would have normally gotten a hit, they aren't clutch. They a choked.

FanGraphs calculates clutch using Win Probability Added (WPA) and the Leverage Index (pLI). The Win Probability Added calculates how much a player increases his team's chances of winning, while the Leverage Index measures how much pressure a certain situation puts on a player.

While clutch can do a great job at describing the past, it doesn't predict the future. Clutchness is random. Just because a player performs in high leverage situations, doesn't mean he'll continue to perform under pressure. But as it does a great job predicting the past, we can see which players have been the most clutch this year, helping their team in high leverage situations.

Let's take a look at the 2014 All-Clutch team.