Re-thinking My Vulcan Stance on "Clutchiness"

Being almost 30 I grew up before the growing to semi-mainstream status of SABR, and even Empiricism.  Most of my life I believed in a player digging down deep.  I believed in choking.  I believed being in the zone and momentum.  Then I picked up BP's "Baseball Between the Numbers: Why Everything You Know About Baseball is Wrong" and my whole world changed:

"In How We Know What Isn't So, Thomas Gilovich noted the many problems with human perception and analysis of everyday events. We find nonexistent patterns in random data, extrapolate from too little information, weight events that confirm our preconceptions vastly more than those that disagree with them, and eagerly accept secondhand information as fact. This is not to say that our eyes lie to us all the time, but there are inherent biases when people trust only their eyes."

The armchair psychologist in me had a proverbial big-o by mixing cognitive biases with baseball.  Ironically and unfortunately introducing one more element of psychology, specifically epistemology (the philosophy of the quantity and quality of knowledge), made me dismiss entirely the actual "psychological side" of baseball.

I was like Plato and many other name-droppable philosophers.  I wanted to be 100% logical 100% of the time.  I wanted to be Vulcan.  Emotions are primitive and irrational.  It was only after I read Malcolm Gladwell's Blink! did I start to re-respect our Adaptive Unconscious.  Blink in turn introduced me to future Lie to Me science based on Dr. Paul Ekman's life work on emotions, body language, and ANS response (heart rate, sweat, breathing etc). As much as I used this in my everyday life I have no idea why I thought sports players didn't have a Limbic System/Reptilian Brain...then again stranger things have happened.  

Today I was reading "How We Decide", another book on cognition and shit, and it specifically brought up Sports Choking (I should have known, the entire first chapter is dedicated to Tom Brady's 'decision making' when the patriots where cheating their way to their first Superbowl trophy).  Cringing, but open minded, I read on.  It first started off with the epic meltdown of Jean van de Velde golf collapse 1999 Open at Carnoustie.  Way to confirm my confirmation bias that I knew he was going to throw some anecdotal evidence at me.  I don't give Gladwell credibility to just anybody that uses anecdotes and entertaining leaps of cause and effect.  As I read on he brought up an APA Published case study (okay now you have my ear).  

One of the many take aways from this study was the confirmation of "muscle memory".  You often hear athletes/coaches say "try not to over think it".  The Vulcan side of me just absolutely hated this to the point I wanted to find a puppy and kick it.  Why hand something high stakes over to the most ancient part of your brain?  Because that's where the information is now stored.  When you first start off learning a task like putting you are trying to process this information from a network centered in your prefrontal cortex, ie your logic part. Once you have it in your "muscle memory" analyzing the swing is a redundant filter.  Your brain already knows what it's doing after it's been embedded so your "logic brain" becomes the backseat driver or the boss over your shoulder.  

Now the whole concept of choking is simply folding under pressure.  The problem I have is "what is pressure"?.  Winshares to me is next to useless for measuring a players performance under pressure simply because "pressure" is highly volatile, subjective, and personal.  Ortiz doesn't have fangraphs in the batters box telling him that his 5th inning 2 out hit is more valuable than a different and just as arbitrary circumstance.  There will be obvious situations, bottom of the 9th 2 outs; however, there are much greyer but important situations like when a batter may have more on the line like say a hitting streak or slump he needs to "break out of".  Does getting a hit mean you're breaking a slump?  Empirically no, however, if a player believes it can it may affect his view of how important the AB is thus rising his stress levels.   

Do people with the ego of Bonds or the half-assedness of JD Drew "feel" pressure in certain circumstances?  It’s the bottom of the 9th but either they don’t care or they think a good result is automatic.  Lidge was so dominate was he even nervous to the point of over thinking before he gave up that blast?  After the blast was he so scared he was going to do it again causing his downward spiral?  Then again I’m just making assumptions how Bonds, Drew and Lidge even feel, which is the point.  We all like to think we can read minds or use introspection, however, it's not always that cut and dry.  Just because I think a Skip Schumaker's random AB is trivial doesn't mean Skip thinks it is.  Maybe he bet Pete Rose 100k he'd get a double.

Until we get a Lie to Me Lab in the Batters Box and on the Mound or at least ASR monitors during real time play, determining for sure how much perceived pressure a player is under will be difficult if not improbable.  I don't think you can "recreate" the pressure that professional athletes are under in a study.  Good luck simulating the entire world watching you try to close out a pennant with Beltran at the plate.  With the tools we have now we can probably get a decent gauge by doing Facial Action Coding during plays and reconciling them with Pitch F/X data or mechanical breakdowns; in other words doing a case study on "Mound Presence" or "Confidence".  Do you see fear in his eyes?  Is he showing manipulators and stressors that deviate from his baseline?   Even so did it affect his mechanics?  Is this repeatable and predictable?  Where can I get funnel cake?  Man I wish I was at a carnival.