Making A List...

This weekend's Wall Street Journal is a regular listmania.

It starts with an article on why list making is such big business these days:

Several factors are feeding the commercial growth: Lists are a cheap, fast way for publishers and Internet sites to generate new content -- especially online, where users are often creating the lists themselves. As consumers face more ways to spend their time and money, companies hope their bullet-point, short-attention-span offerings will appeal to even the most time-starved. Lists also offer order, real or perceived, in a chaotic world. "People have a hunger for patterns and order and stability in a rapidly changing world," says Ben Dattner, a professor of organizational psychology at New York University.

Executives often manage by lists. Bob Cancalosi, the chief learning officer for GE Healthcare, a division of General Electric, keeps "microlists" for daily tasks, which he constantly compares to his "mothership list" about the company's management philosophies and goals. Individual projects get their own lists -- for one leadership class, he writes a 450-item checklist 125 days before the event. Weekends are no different. Every Saturday morning, he brews a pot of coffee and makes a list, with items like "buy gallon of milk," "take daughter to piano" and "run three miles." "I think I'm a little anal," he says.

Just a tad.

It continues with First Lady Laura Bush's Five Best Books :

1. Hop on Pop By Dr. Seuss Random House, 1963

2. The 'Little House' Series By Laura Ingalls Wilder Harper, 1932-43

3. The Brothers Karamazov By Fyodor Dostoyevsky 1880

4. Little Women By Louisa May Alcott 1868

5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn By Mark Twain 1884

She's right on with Hop On Pop. A true classic.

Finally, and most controversial is a list of the biggest clutch hits in post-season baseball history:

The study of "clutchness" in baseball has emerged as a sexy topic lately, drawing attention from teams, fan sites, network executives and even an economist from Yale University. By breaking down tens of thousands of ballgames into lines of code based on factors like the inning, the score and the numbers of outs and base-runners, stat-heads have constructed something called a "transitional probability matrix" that can tell you, depending on the situation on the field, exactly how much any event (like a clutch hit) improves a team's odds of winning.

So with the 2006 playoffs set to begin Tuesday, we went looking for an objective way to measure the significance of postseason hits, and how recent ones compare to some of the most hallowed clouts in baseball history.

Using existing models and consulting with statisticians, we developed our own four-part formula. Then we dug through old box scores from postseason and divisional playoff games to rank more than 300 candidates -- ranging from obscure singles in last year's early rounds to the sorts of home runs that people write books about.

Sound good, right? Here are the results:

PLAYER/TEAM SERIES/ GAME/INNING ODDS OF WINNING GAME BEFORE/AFTER THE HIT ODDS OF PITCHER GIVING UP HIT ODDS OF WINNING THE WS SCORE COMMENTS

1. Tony Womack Arizona Diamondbacks 2001 WS
Game 7, 9th 39%/83% M. Rivera (2.9%) +50% 86.2 Surprise! This overlooked one-out, game-tying double in Game 7 is baseball's greatest clutch hit.

2. Bill MazeroskiPittsburgh Pirates 1960 WS
Game 7, 9th 65%/100% *R. Terry (2.2%) +50% 84 The only Game 7 walkoff World Series HR in history, but the Pirates, playing at home with a tie score, already had a 65% chance of winning.

3. Kirk GibsonLos Angeles Dodgers 1988 WS
Game 1, 9th 13%/100% D. Eckersley (1.8%) +16% 81 This oft-televised Game 1 pinch-hit, two-out, two-run, come-from-behind walkoff HR off Dennis Eckersley (5 HRs allowed all season) actually lives up to the hype.

4. Bobby Thomson New York Giants 1951 NL Playoff
Game 3, 9th 31%/100% R. Branca (2.2%) +25% 80.78 HR erased a two-run deficit to beat rival Brooklyn Dodgers in final game of a division playoff. But new book "The Echoing Green" shows the Giants were stealing signs.

5. Tris Speaker Boston Red Sox 1912 WS
Game 8, 10th 39%/ 83% C. Mathewson (2.5%) +50% 80.77 One-out, game-tying single with two runners on set up game-winning sacrifice by a teammate. Christy Mathewson was pitching his 29th inning of the series.

That's the one that John Hinderaker recalls fondly.

6. Joe Carter Toronto Blue Jays 1993 WS
Game 6, 9th 39%/100% M. Williams (1%) +25% 78.8 Just the second walkoff HR to end a World Series. Only knock is that it happened in Game 6, not Game 7.

7. Edgar Renteria Florida Marlins 1997 WS
Game 7, 11th 66%/100% C. Nagy (25.5%) +50% 78.2 Bases-loaded World-Series-winning single would rank higher if the pitcher had been tougher.

Who did the Marlins beat in the World Series that year anyway?

8. Francisco Cabrera Atlanta Braves 1992 NLCS
Game 7, 9th 24%/100% S. Belinda (19.4%) +25% 78.19 Francisco who? This forgotten pinch-hit, two-run, bases-loaded come-from-behind walkoff single against Pittsburgh ranks among the greats.

9. Joe Morgan Cincinnati Reds 1975 WS
Game 7, 9th 51%/84% J. Burton (25%) +50% 77.7 HR by Boston's Carlton Fisk in Game 6 is better known, but Mr. Morgan's top-of-the-ninth single won it all.

10. Scott Brosius NY Yankees 2001 WS
Game 5, 9th 4%/54% B. Kim (2.6%) +50% 75.6 Some Yankee fans had already left when Mr. Brosius uncorked this two-out, game-tying . The Yankees won the game three innings later.

Notice anything missing from the list? Something like a game winning home run in the bottom of the 11th inning in Game Six in what is arguably the greatest World Series of all time? Any list of clutch post-season hits that doesn't include the name Kirby Puckett isn't a credible list.