The big story in Oakland this year has, for once, not been the theories espoused by Athletics General Manager Billy Beane. Nor has it been the impending departure of a defending Most Valuable Player; it hasn’t even been the relative success of the prospects with whom Beane replaced departed aces Tim Hudson and Mark Mulder. Instead, it’s been the team’s appalling hitting in the clutch.

Any way you choose to look at it, April has been a month of failure in high-pressure situations for the A’s. Entering play yesterday, going by team OPS, the A’s were second-worst in the American League with runners on, third-worst with runners in scoring position, worst with runners in scoring position and two outs, fourth-worst with the bases loaded, and third-worst in close and late situations (i.e., the seventh inning and after with the game tied or one team ahead by one run).The only teams with so consistently bad a record are the Kansas City Royals, whose offense is barely of big league caliber, and, oddly, the Chicago White Sox, who have the best record in the game right now. All of this has contributed to a futile Oakland attack that ranks third from last in the league in runs scored.

As is usually the case with clutch-hitting statistics, there are specific mitigating factors here; some Oakland hitters, like Jason Kendall, have done very well in clutch situations, and the team is 3-1 in one-run games. Really, the team’s poor production is no mystery: The A’s just don’t have a very good offense, and their two best hitters, Eric Chavez and Erubiel Durazo, have started the season abysmally, combining for three home runs and a batting average just north of the Mendoza line. That they have performed even worse with runners on isn’t the root cause of Oakland’s problems.

While all that’s so, the A’s now collectively have a few more at-bats than a single player will in a full season, and however you choose to define a clutch situation, they’ve hit like a pitcher in it. This isn’t a very good offensive team, but it’s not that bad. Is something in particular going on?

There are a great many theories about clutch hitting, and very few facts. The extreme argument on one end would be that the A’s hitters are choking because they feel they have to make up for the loss of two ace pitchers, and perhaps because the emphasis the A’s place on walks leaves them less prepared when they need to put the bat on the ball. On the other end, the argument would be that there is no such thing as clutch hitting, that on the whole players perform as well in clutch situations as in less pressurized ones, and that the A’s performance is a matter of simple statistical variation.

Neither of these explanations, of course, makes sense. It’s plausible that, say, Chavez would perhaps place too much pressure on himself to drive in runs, and so end up driving none in; but the idea that choking has spread like some airborne pathogen over an entire squad of hitters has no credibility. Likewise, we know that players aren’t dice or coins, and that everything has a specific cause. Claiming that the A’s have failed for the same reason that a coin flipped 50 times will sometimes come up heads 40 times in a row is, if anything, even less convincing than the opposite argument.

In an interesting recent development, Bill James – the sabermetrician who (a bit unfairly) is more than anyone else associated with that latter argument – wrote a widely discussed article for the Baseball Research Journal called “Underestimating the Fog.” In it, he wrote about the possibility that perhaps he and other researchers had been unable to discover convincing statistical evidence of clutch hitting because they’d been looking in the wrong places with the wrong tools, and offered the following memorable metaphor for the failure of researchers to locate proof of what most every baseball fan knows exists:

“A sentry is looking through a fog, trying to see if there is an invading army out there, somewhere through the fog. He looks for a long time, and he can’t see any invaders, so he goes and gets a really, really bright light to shine into the fog. Still doesn’t see anything.

“The sentry returns and reports that there is just no army out there – but the problem is, he has underestimated the density of the fog. It seems, intuitively, that if you shine a bright enough light into the fog, if there was an army out there you’d have to be able to see it – but in fact you can’t.”

James is right. How, for instance, can researchers refute the existence of clutch hitting when no one can agree on what exactly a clutch situation is? If Ichiro Suzuki finds himself hitting in the top of the ninth in a blowout with a 44-game hitting streak on the line, it doesn’t count toward any clutch statistics anyone keeps. If he finds himself batting in the top of the ninth with his team up by 10 and a man on third, it does. These kinds of variables are just some of the fog to which James is referring.

For another, consider that a hitter could drive in the decisive runs in a dozen key ballgames against the best pitchers in the league, and yet have a poor overall batting average in what are usually defined as clutch situations. Judged by numbers alone, that hitter could be held up as evidence that he isn’t a clutch hitter – a demonstrably untrue conclusion.

The implication of what James is saying is not only that the failure to locate something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, but also that it may not be possible to find it. The variable definition of what are clutch situations, and the difficulty of measuring performance in them, may just be too much for anyone to overcome.

Bringing this back to the A’s, it would be nice to think that someone, be it a grizzled scout or someone with a really expensive laptop, could offer some convincing reasons for why the team hasn’t done well in the clutch. Their fans would certainly like to hear it, and so would anyone who’s heard game announcers harping endlessly on the issue. The fact is that things just happen in baseball, and sometimes there’s no choice but to live with uncertainty.

Will the A’s turn it around? Was there anything really wrong to begin with? Is Alex Rodriguez going to start hitting when it counts as a Yankee? Who knows?

Besides, you might have a hard time convincing White Sox reliever Damaso Marte that the A’s have any problems. When Marco Scutaro knocked in the winning run in the bottom of the ninth to give the A’s a 2-1 victory yesterday, Marte was probably unconcerned with where Oakland ranked in close-and-late situations.