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Originally Posted by fleury
Totally right. Statistics as they say, can be misleading. I think in this case what this shows is when the young team is running away with the game they’re really confident. When they’re put in a clutch situation they’re not performing as well. How to they work through it? Coaching? Psychologists? Because it looks totally like a mental block to me.
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I wish I knew. It could just be bad luck. Stats like this are generally not predictive. Like one year you can suck and the next be awesome. Few players have shown this to be a skill in any way. I think there could be several parts to it and I’ll list some I’ve discussed on other message boards and scrubbing through stat sites lately. In no particular order here:
A. Bad luck, likely the biggest thing here. Hitting into double plays, hitting screamers directly at gloves, etc.
B.Manager not making right calls in situations. Like say bunting when you shouldn’t. However Montoyo has actually bunted less than most managers but I agree with most he’s not the most technical in game manager so there could be improvement here. Also maybe he’s just not motivating them to do their best? I have read from Boston that Cora is awesome and has total team buy in and that I believe can make a difference.
C. Team is just young in general and is not good at this stuff. However some of the better clutch players are young (Vlad and Bo) and some of our worst are vets (Semien and Grichuk)
D. Lineup composition. Not enough LH bats, not enough discipline throughout the lineup. It is true that the bottom of the lineup has been awful in these situations. Basically Bo, Vlad and Teoscar have been good and the rest have mostly sucked.
E. This one I didn’t find, but someone did some digging and found that Jays do quite badly against sliders. Most relievers these days have good sliders, might just be the lineup doesn’t match up well against power bullpen arms. We all read that guys like Biggio also struggle badly against 95+ heat, so that could factor in too.
There could be more for sure and I hope they turn it around. You can tell Atkins and Shapiro are thinking on this since both have talked about their approach as a reason the team has struggled to close out games. I believe that applies to both hitting and pitching. I don’t think they how they’ve done so far is terribly prescriptive of how they do in the future, but if they want to catch up with Boston they better start hitting late in games.