Whether or not the Boston Red Sox win the 2013 World Series, David Ortiz has already made a compelling case to be named the most valuable player. Through the first five games, the 37-year-old slugger has hit for a 0.733 batting average in 20 plate appearances. If he didn’t take another at-bat, his World Series average this year would rank second all time, trailing only Billy Hatcher’s 1990 performance in which he notched nine hits in 12 at-bats.
Ortiz’s average struck us as so clutch that we wanted to put it in an even broader context. Where might it stack up against other great, timely performances in other professions and disciplines? So we’ve put together the world’s least scientific Clutch Matrix, a scatterplot of some of the most consistent and impressive performances by athletes, actors, financiers, and others—and we’re ready to hear how wrong we are in the comments below.
