King of Clutch: Nolan Arenado keeps defying the odds

DENVER – Carlos Gonzalez was comparing Nolan Arenado to Kobe Bryant. Arenado laughed it off. “I’m not on that level yet,” he said after hitting his second consecutive game-winning three-pointer. One went for three runs, one went for three bags, both swung the game from the loss column to the win column. That definitely sounds like Kobe.

A huge difference, of course, is that in basketball, you can force the ball to your best player and make sure the game is decided by his incredibly still hand. In baseball, you have to be coming up in the order. But you also can’t miss your chances because you may not get another. In this way, being clutch in the NBA and being clutch in MLB are very different because the former is almost always derived from end-of-game situations whereas the latter can see decisive moments even as early as the first inning.

When it actually does come down to the final few outs like it has for the Colorado Rockies the last two games, it makes it that much more special. For anyone who has watched Arenado for the last several seasons, and understood his ability to rise to the moment — to not waste his most valuable opportunities — his final swings in his two most recent contests were nothing new … just a little more special.

In February, BSN Denver looked at the career of the Rockies superstar third baseman and discovered a remarkable statistical truth; he is better at the plate the more high-leverage the situation. A debate rages on about whether or not this constitutes some measurable or projectable skill.

Given the events of the past few days and the season he is having, we figured this would be a good time for an update:

Bases empty: .276/.331/.538

Men on: .328/.376/.616

RISP: .358/.427/.716

2 outs w/ RISP: .321/.424/.607

So the next time someone tries to tell you that Nolan Arenado has high RBI totals because he gets an inordinate number of opportunities or because he plays at Coors Field, you can just point them to those very easy to understand, and pretty difficult to dispute, numbers.

The most impressive numbers are yet to come. Because, as we discussed above, measuring the very idea of clutch in baseball can be quite tricky, we can go a step further and include baseball-reference.com’s leverage index. Understanding how it is calculated is a bit difficult (and you can find that here) but the essential idea is to give credit for plays that most heavily impacted the outcomes of games given full context.

Here are Arenado’s numbers on that scale:

Low Leverage: .252./.280/.554

Medium Leverage: .330/.407/.524

High Leverage: .419/.486/.871

That’s right. In “Low Leverage” situations this season, Arenado has an OPS of .824. In “High Leverage” situations, it’s 1.357. In his career, those numbers are .773 and .929 respectively. You can get into fancier, ballpark adjusted, stats if you want, you aren’t going to find a different trend.

When it matters the most, Nolan Arenado is simply one of the very best there is, like his favorite basketball player. He’s NA28 or the Purple Mamba. He is the King of Clutch and it doesn’t look like he intends to surrender his crown anytime soon.