Home runs are undoubtedly one of the most exciting parts of baseball, especially clutch, go-ahead home runs. But any long-time baseball fan has also probably seen their fair share of useless home runs: when a team is winning 9-0 and somebody cranks a solo shot to make it 10-0, which almost always has a very low impact on the outcome of the game. The reason I bring this up is to further explore the idea of clutch. If a big power hitter swats 40+ home runs in a season, they are likely to have quite a few RBIs as well, and what more is there to ask for? But how many home runs are actually hit in the clutch? A team looking to lock-up a big power hitter in a long-term deal will want that hitter to get big hits in big situations. So, let us explore some of the best sluggers from the 2023 season, and determine how many home runs they hit in the clutch.
For the sake of this mini-analysis, I will define two types of clutch home runs statistic: 1) Meaningful home run percentage (MHR%)—the proportion of home runs hit when the absolute difference in score is 3 or less, or when a home run brings the absolute difference in score into this range—and 2) pure clutch home runs percentage (PCHR%)—the proportion of tying or go-ahead home runs hit. This way, I can use MHR% to measure home runs that “blow the game open” as well as home runs that bring the game into save-territory, while PCHR% fit the more common idea of clutch home runs.
I want to focus on a specific subset of players: those who hit at least 40 home runs and tallied at least 100 RBI. This gives us a list of five players: Matt Olson (54, 139), Ronald Acuña Jr. (41, 106), Marcell Ozuna (40, 100), Kyle Schwarber (47, 104), and Pete Alonso (46, 118). To calculate both MHR% and PCHR%, I analyzed video of all home runs hit by each player, and manually determined how many home runs were hit in the clutch, consistent with the definitions provided above. Furthermore, I will only be counting home runs hit during the regular season. Here are the findings:
MHR%:
Matt Olson: 42/54 = 77.78% (4 sig figs)
Ronald Acuña Jr.: 31/41 = 75.61%
Marcell Ozuna: 31/40 = 77.50%
Kyle Schwarber: 39/47 = 82.98%
Pete Alonso: 37/46 = 80.43%
PCHR%:
Matt Olson: 19/54 = 35.19%
Ronald Acuña Jr.: 15/41 = 36.59%
Marcell Ozuna: 16/40 = 40.00%
Kyle Schwarber: 24/47 = 51.06%
Pete Alonso: 19/46 = 41.30%
The percentages are actually quite similar, which seems like it might follow convergence to the mean, but it’s important to note a couple caveats with this data. Kyle Schwarber and Ronald Acuña Jr. are lead-off hitters, so whenever they hit a home run to start the game, it counts towards their PCHR%. As an addendum, the Atlanta Braves had the highest team runs per game, as well as the highest run differential in the majors during the 2023 season. Basically, the Braves were out-scoring everybody (probably in part because they had three players with 40+ home runs and 100+ RBI), and so Acuña may have had fewer opportunities to hit game tying or lead-taking home runs even though he was also a lead-off hitter. A similar argument can be made for Matt Olson and Marcell Ozuna. Another important thing to note is that Alonso and Schwarber are the only players on the list to hit under .220 (everybody else had batting averages of over .270), while also collecting the fewest non-home run extra base hits on the list as well. Perhaps one reason we see Alonso and Schwarber with the highest MHR% and PCHR% is because home runs are their big hits. It’s possible that the Braves’ battery of Acuña, Olson, and Ozuna had more clutch hits in total, trading some home runs for singles, doubles, and triples instead.
This was supposed to be a short project that I could complete quickly, though it has opened up many avenues for exploration. I’m aware that high leverage situations and clutch are tracked by FanGraphs, so there may be a way to fuse clutch home runs with existing clutch statistics, for example, modifying the statistics so only home runs hit in high leverage situations count, or comparing other hits in high leverage situations as well as home runs.