Don’t ask me why I started going through the league splits year-by-year on baseball-reference.com to see which innings produce the highest offensive totals. Truth be told I can’t even remember. But it turns out the innings in which hitters generally produce the best OPSes are the first, fourth, and sixth.

The order changes every year, but those are almost always the top three, which makes a lot of sense: A team’s best hitters usually hit in the first inning. They’ll often come up again (with a better sense of what the pitcher is throwing) in the fourth, and the sixth must be the perfect window in which the best hitters most frequently face tiring starting pitchers.

Every year, hitters in the ninth inning produce the lowest OPS. Often it’s about 30 points lower than the next lowest inning. Presumably this is because Proven Closers come in and Shorten The Game. In 2011, Major Leaguers in total posted a .728 OPS, but only a .665 mark in the ninth inning.

Anyway, that’s all trivia. I bring it up because of this, which is also trivia: Carlos Beltran — he of the .857 career OPS — has a .941 career OPS in the ninth inning.

I don’t really know what that means and I suspect it means very little beyond what we already know about Carlos Beltran being awesome. But neither Derek Jeter nor David Ortiz nor Macier Izturis nor Albert Pujols nor Dustin Pedroia nor Chipper Jones nor Reggie Jackson nor Edgar Renteria nor most other reputedly clutch guys Twitter and I could come up have ninth-inning OPSes that match their career lines. Most don’t even come close.

Obviously there are a bunch of others out there, and obviously there’s a whole long conversation about clutchness that I’m not eager to revisit here — again, this is all trivia — but the only two other guys I found with ninth-inning OPSes better than their career marks are Evan Longoria and Tony Gwynn. And neither’s ninth-inning uptick is as severe as Beltran’s.

Supposedly the Rockies are making a move for our man. That’d be fine by me. I’m still sort of maintaining the vague hope that Sandy Alderson can pull off a Christmas miracle and Vernon-Wells Jason Bay on someone then sign Beltran with the freed up cash, but I probably need to confront the very real possibility that it’s not happening.