Projecting Future Performance
Last week, Geoff Baker wrote a series of blog posts that dealt with the issue that has been dominating the blogosphere conversation for most of the past three months – the playing time of Adam Jones, Raul Ibanez, and Jose Vidro, and how it should be distributed. Don’t worry – this post is not about that topic. At least, not explicitly. This post is about a commonly accepted principle that was laid out very well by Baker in that trio of entries. The idea is summed up in this statement:
It’s going to be hard to keep Raul Ibanez out of the lineup now that he’s hit six home runs in nine games. Equally tough to sideline Jose Vidro now that he’s back to being a hits machine. I was all for playing Adam Jones every day when those other guys were struggling back in July. But things have changed. The veterans have stepped up and earned their playing time of late.
In July, Geoff was on board with the belief that Adam Jones would be able to help the Mariners as an everyday player, and the struggling veterans should be ceding playing time to the more talented youngster. He felt the struggles of guys like Vidro and Ibanez warrented a change, and Jones provided a superior option. He doesn’t feel that way anymore. Why? Because Raul Ibanez and Jose Vidro are hitting well recently, and Baker believes in the predictive power of the hot hand.
This isn’t a unique position. Almost everyone believes in the predictive power of the hot hand. The overwhelming majority of people in America base their future expectations – not just in sports, but in life – on their most recent experience. In sports, this is even more prevalent, as we’ve all witnessed players perform at a level far beyond what we expected them to do. Joe Dimaggio’s 56 game hit streak may be one of the most celebrated records in sports. Seattle saw Ken Griffey Jr hit home runs in eight consecutive games. Or, to bring it back to the current reason for this discussion, Raul Ibanez has seven home runs in his last 48 at-bats after hitting six bombs in his first 372 at-bats. He’s on fire. He’s swinging the bat well. Each pitch looks like a beachball. Pick your cliche`.
We all know a hot streak when we see one, even if we don’t know why they occur. There’s a debate about whether hot streaks are random fluctuation of events or an actual change in skills for a temporary period of time. I don’t even begin to know the answer to that question, and I can see the validity of both arguments. But that’s not what this post is about.
No, this post is about the predictive power of the hot streak and how that should affect our expecations. As Geoff laid out in the three linked blog entries above, the common wisdom is recent success should be a huge factor in determining playing time. Raul Ibanez is on fire (over 48 at-bats) and Adam Jones hasn’t earned his playing time (over 23 at-bats), and those performances were enough to change Geoff’s mind about who should be taking the field for the rest of the year. Getting away from that specific discussion, the issue I want to address is how much credence we should give recent performance in developing our expectations for how a player should perform going forward, even in the very near future.
And, you know me, I’m not a big fan of developing opinions on anecdotal evidence. I know there are random examples that we can cite to support any cause we want, but I don’t particularly care about that kind of analysis. I want to know what a large swath of history tells us about the predicitve power of recent performance. Do hot hitters actually perform better, even for short periods of time, once we’ve identified that they’re hot hitters?
Keep in mind – this is a statistical argument. This isn’t one of these cases where all the people who think I’m an idiot who needs to care less about the numbers can tell me to get my head out of a spreadsheet and go watch a game, because the hot streak supporters are making an argument based on numbers. All I’m doing is testing the hypothesis of whether the numbers they’re choosing to believe in actually have any meaning.
Okay, so now that the overly long introduction is out of the way, let’s look at the evidence. The best research done on this issue that I’ve ever read comes from The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball, written by Tom Tango, Mitchel Lichtman, and Andy Dolphin. For people who care at all about baseball statistics, The Book is a must read. These guys are among the very best researchers on baseball issues alive, and The Book is a comprehensive review of almost any question relating to statistics you’d want to see asked. While it’s not the easiest reading you’ll ever have, it still comes highly recommended.
In the second chapter of The Book, the guys tackled the very question this post deals with – do hot streaks present any kind of real information that is useful in understanding how a hitter is likely to do going forward? To test this, they pulled in every play from the 2000 to 2003 seasons and identified hot and cold streaks as the upper and lower 5% of all performances over any five game sample that included at least 20 plate appearances. The best 5% of performances went into a hot bucket and the worst 5% went into a cold bucket. That gave them 543 unique players creating a total of 6,408 “hot streaks”, and 633 players creating a total of 6,489 cold streaks. With nearly 13,000 streaks in the sample, they eliminated nearly any bias complaint you could happen to have with the study, and created a sample large enough to give us a conclusive answer – do the players who have been identified as “hot hitters” perform better than expected based on their historical averages, and vice versa, do the slumping hitters perform worse than expected in their next few games?
Without getting too deep into the statistical minutae (for that, you should buy The Book), here are the numbers (from page 56, for those of you who already own it) – for offensive performance, they use a metric called Weighted On Base Average, of wOBA for short, which essentially sums up total offensive performance and scales it to look like on base percentage. Think of it like OPS, just better, and on a different scale. .340 is average, .400 is great, .300 is bad. Just like OBP – but as a total sum of offensive production.
Average wOBA of hot hitters during streak: .587
Expected wOBA of hot hitters in 1 game after the streak: .365
Average wOBA of hot hitters in 1 game after the streak: .369
Expected wOBA of hit hitters in 5 games after the streak: .365
Average wOBA of hot hitters in 5 games after the streak: .369
As you can see, the production of the hitters in their sixth game after being identified as being hot (and hot doesn’t even begin to describe a .587 wOBA – that’s scorching), the players performed .004 better than expected if we had just used a three year average of their past performance and had no knowledge of what they’d done in their previous five games. Statistically significant? Yes, but by the thinnest of margins.
Since I’m wary of overstepping fair use and giving away too much copyrighted material, rather than spelling out the actual numbers of the cold hitters, I’ll tell you that the result in basically the same on the opposite end – the players performed worse than expected by an ever so tiny margin immediately after a five game super slump. They also re-ran the data over a seven game sample and looked at the performance in the following three games after being identified as hot or cold and found the numbers consistent with the five game samples.
But, I know, there will be some protests about how not all hot streaks are the same, and averaging 543 players together will be unfair to those who were really, truly hot. Thankfully, the guys included a list of the 10 hottest hitters over a seven game stretch. Marcus Giles had the most success run, going 18 for 25 with 7 extra base hits from July 25th through July 29th of 2003, good for a .720/.731/1.160 line. 18 for 25! His next 5 games? 0 for 4, 2 for 4, 0 for 4, 2 for 3, and 0 for 4, a grand total of 4 for 19 and a .211/.348/.368 line.
Giles was not alone. Of the ten hottest hitters from 2003, nine of them then proceeded to hit worse than expected (again, based on historical averages and ignoring the recent hot streak) in their next three games, with only Magglio Ordonez bucking the trend and continuing to hit well. From July 20th through July 24th, Ordonez went 13 for 19 with seven extra base hits, then went 12 for 20 with five more extra base hits in his next five games. That gave him a 25 for 39 stretch where he ran an 1.850 OPS over 46 plate appearances and is one of the best runs in recent baseball history. From July 31st through August 3rd, Ordonez followed this 10 game hot streak with an 0 for 14 series of hitless games, and in the 47 plate appearances (spanning 11 games) after we could identify him as one of the hottest hitters in recent memory, Ordonez hit .244/.340/.366.
The first sentence of the conclusion of the chapter, quoted from The Book:
Knowing that a hitter has been in or is in the midst of a hot or cold streak has little predictive value.
Historical evidence suggests that knowing that a player is on fire should do essentially nothing for our expecations of what he’ll do going forward, even in the very near future. In fact, given the choice of being totally ignorant of recent performance or knowing exactly how each player performed in a small sample, you would, in almost every case, be better off being totally ignorant. The natural tendancy to overstate the value of the predictive power of the hot streak (or cold streak) outweighs the sliver of actual useful information that is included in hot streak analysis. Because of our own biases, we’d make more correct decisions if we had less data.
Of course, the ideal isn’t to have less data, but to understand our biases and compensate accordingly, allowing us to live in a data-filled world and still make optimal decisions as often as possible. That’s part of what we’re trying to do here, and what statistical analysis does a good job of explaining – identify where human error leads us to drawing conclusions that are unsupported by the realities of life.
Going back to the Mariner-centric discussion that started this all, we have the Raul Ibanez/Adam Jones situation. If you, like Geoff Baker did, believed at the end of July that Adam Jones was a better player than Raul Ibanez and should be taking the field everyday, then nothing that has happened on the field since then should change your opinion. Raul Ibanez isn’t any more likely to hit well tonight than he was three weeks ago. His expected performance should be, for all intents and purposes, exactly the same. Whatever you thought of him on July 31st, you should also think of him now.
History paints a clear picture. Again, quoting from The Book (page 45):
One of the running themes of this book is that, very frequently, fans and analysts make too much from too little.
This is an important bias to keep in mind when performing any kind of analytical exercise. Our natural emotional reactions lead us to overvalue what has happened recently, and too often, we draw incorrect conclusions about what is going to happen based on things that have little or no real predictive value.
I actually have a lot more to write on the subject of correct player evaluations and projections (including talking about longer hot streaks, such as Jose Vidro’s, and how to evaluate a real change in performance), but for time and space reasons, I’m going to have to make that a post for another day.
Before I go, I’m going to make a request – please don’t turn the comments into another chance to rehash the same old argument we’ve been having for the last three months in the comment threads. If you feel that Ibanez should be starting due to clubhouse chemistry, veteran experience, or if you never felt that Jones was better than Ibanez, that’s fine – that’s also not what this post is about. The topic is about the predictive power of hot and cold streaks. I’ll be a much happier author if that’s what we talk about in the comments.
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Hey Ryan Braun is a rookie. That means Adam Jones will hit .341 with 24 homers and 62 RBI…
Give me a break!!!
…What?
To follow up on my previous post, I decided to run the numbers and do a simple analysis to see how many “hot streaks” we would expect to see over the course of a season if batting were exactly like coin flipping (i.e. an at-bat is just like a coin toss, except with probability of heads closer to .3 than .5). We use the following default values:
– Probability of a hit: 0.3 (i.e. a decent hitter)
– Number of at-bats: 500 (i.e. roughly a season’s worth of ABs)
– Number of simulations: 100 (i.e. 100 different seasons or 100 different players with the same inherent skill)
– A streak is defined as a sequence of 20 at-bats where the proportion of hits is 0.45, i.e. the batter is batting 50% better than their average. Overlapping streaks are not allowed.
We also assume that tosses (i.e. at-bats) are independent, which is probably a bit strong in reality but makes things a lot simpler. With these values, here’s a table showing how many streaks occurred over the 100 simulated seasons/players:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
—————————-
3 9 24 22 18 10 10 3 1
So, overall, it looks like we should be expecting 4-5 such streaks over the course of 500 at-bats from a .300 hitter, but it’s not implausible to see as few as 2 or as many as 7-8.
Gah, formatting got messed up. Here’s a better view:
# Streaks %
1 3
2 9
3 24
4 22
5 18
6 10
7 10
8 3
9 1
Hmmm Dave, I’m looking at recent years, and you’re right – it’s not a fluke year for debuters, there’s a “hunter pence” and “ryan braun” every year essentially.
But I still believe you’re tweaking your “debuter” numbers. Does the average big leaguer get the less than 50 ABers removed? And if this is such a good strategy why isn’t everyone replaced with someone making his debut? (and shouldn’t we be looking at the median anyway?)
back to the hot streaks: some times a sustained hot streak is explainable, many times an unreported injury healed or change in apporach. Vidro’s hot streak is starting to lose it’s ‘streak’ quality. Perhaps there is actually an adjustment being made. I’ve noticed a better plate presence, and his hits have become less ‘bloopy’ and more solid ground balls up the middle. You’ve got to admire his ability to hit to the right side with a man on third. I didn’t like this guy when he showed up, and I still think we’d be better off without him next year (inevitable decline), but this year he’s earned some respect, and justified playing time. I’m not convinced Adam Jones will be an upgrade over him (moving ibanez to DH). [Though I still don’t see why we keep Ibanez vs. LHP.]
Speaking of hot streaks, when is Richie Sexson’s hot second half supposed to start?
255-November, lets hope Seattle has a freak blizzard.
Vidro’s hot streak is starting to lose it’s ’streak’ quality
It’s been a month, lots of guys end up hitting .400 for a month.
This thread has been linked to by Tango: http://www.insidethebook.com/ee/index.php/site/article/streaks1/ – basically he agrees with Dave.
It’s been a month, lots of guys end up hitting .400 for a month
Let’s see what the numbers say to that (see post #253 for sim method). Assuming a .300 hitter:
Streak length: 0 1 2 3
% players/seasons: 76 17 6 1
So about 25% of .300 hitters would be expected to have at least one month where they bat > .400. Alternatively, you could say that a guy like Vidro would be expected to have one month-long hot streak about once every four years on average.
Quick correction to above, table should read:
# of streaks: 0 1 2 3
% players/seasons: 76 17 6 1
Actually it sounds like Tango basically agrees with me, too. What I’ve been saying is that Vidro’s and Ibanez’s improved performance in the second half has now put their season numbers near their career norms, both now appear to be relatively healthy, and it’s likely they’ll continue to hit near their career norms (which are pretty good) for the remainder of the season.
Obviously, it’s very unlikely that either will continue indefinitely on the pace they’ve been on recently (especially Ibanez who’s been hitting bombs at a ridiculous pace for the past two weeks) but there appears to be an assumption by some here that when their performance does drop it will return to their previous subpar levels of earlier in the summer rather than to expected career norms. I don’t see any real reason to believe that.
I’ve read this thread with great interest (great read, in general mostly interesting comments, but no reason to throw in my $0.02 since others were making all of the points I would make), but….
“…there appears to be an assumption by some here that when their performance does drop it will return to their previous subpar levels of earlier in the summer rather than to expected career norms.”
…man! rsrobinson, you seem to be a reasonably intelligent person, but who the hell is saying that? Dave’s post, and comments, specifically refute what you claim “some here” are saying. That was the whole point of Dave’s mea culpa about writing Raul off too early based only on 2007 performance and not giving enough credence to his 3-year numbers.
I’m pretty sure, based on what Dave has written previously about Jones and Ibanez, and what he has written here, that he would say that this post is only about whether a guy like Ibanez’ or Vidro’s current streaks are predictive of them continuing to tear it up, as opposed to regressing to their previously established, 3-year means. I also think that Dave miht say (based on previous posts) that even at those levels for Ibanez and Vidr, what we can project about Adam Jones (offensively and defensively justifies getting him in the line-up even if they do.
He’s not talking about clubhouse chemistry and politics, which he has acknowledged do (and to some extent should) play a part in how and whether that decision gets made. He’s just arguing the vaidity of the common, misperceived value of the streak as a predictive tool in making that decision. It’s amazing to me how many intelligent USSM readers do not seem to get this…..
Dave, I think your conclusions are incorrect and that they go too far. It was fine when you stated that a hot/cold streak has little predictive power. Fine.
But in the last paragraphs where you apply the lesson to the Mariners, I just don’t think you can necessarily reach the conclusions you did about Ibanez and Jones. First, you conclude that if you thought Jones was better than Ibanez at the end of April, you should think so now. In one sense that’s true; if you believed an Ibanez hitting his expected wOBA and providing negative defense was worse than Jones, you should still think that. In another sense, however, and the one probably most commonly held by fans of this site and the M’s generally, I think that’s wrong. I think many people believed that Ibanez was worse than Jones because his bat had gone off a cliff, or that he was injured and unable to perform at expected levels. If that’s what you thought, then it would be reasonable for his hot August to change your opinion, not because you necessarily expected his hot streak to continue, but because I think this shows his bat has likely NOT gone off a cliff, and he is likely NOT injured and unable to perform. Still, I will accept that those people could be *wrong* about their opinion that the “normal” offensive Ibanez was better than the “expected” Jones to begin with, but if that’s what they thought, then their post-July opinions about the relative value of the two *should* have changed.
More seriously, the comment about “whatever you thought of Ibanez on July 31 shouldn’t have changed” is just wrong, IMO. It has to have changed with the new data we have. Again, I would bet that almost everybody on the site would have said that Ibanez was done or that he was injured at that time. Not just a decline due to the aging process, but flat-out done. Not a “random variance” in his performance, but done. If his August doesn’t make you think, “Hey, maybe he’s not done, maybe he was hurt or just had one of those freak bad months,” then I don’t think you are paying attention.
rsrobinson,
No one is saying they are going to fall off the earth. However, Vidro and Ibanez are unlikely to hit at about their career norms for the rest of the year. If you really wanted to project accurately you’d use an amalgamation of their last 3 years of data, with the most recent weighted more than the oldest. I’ll use OPS+, since I like that stat.
Ibanez has a career OPS+ of 110. This year he’s at 117. If I take his last three years and weight them 5/3/2, we’d get a projection of about 119. Since he is on the downside of his career, I’d say 115-120 is probably where he’ll be at. He will likely outperform his career, and be about at his season average going forward.
Vidro is another case all together though. Vidro has a career OPS+ of 109. But it’s been trending downward since ’02. Using the same weights as before I’d give him a projection of 104 for the rest of the year. So he’s not likely to even live up to his career averages. In fact, a 104 OPS+ may be too optimistic. He’s a career .302 hitter who is currently hitting .317. His slugging percentage has fallen every year since ’02, including this year! I’d consider it lucky if he puts up an OPS+ of 104 for the rest of the year.
So what this says is that Adam Jones would have to put up about an OPS of 700-720 to replace Vidro’s bat completely going forward. And that’s without any defensive contribution. He could probably put up about a 600 and still contribute enough with the glove to make it a wash.
But what is a career norm for a 32 yo second baseman with Vidro’s history of leg injuries, career path and physique etc? A summary of the five projection systems suggests it’s a wOBA of .342….
What about Raul? An average of the 5 projection systems suggests a wOBA of .350 which incidentally isn’t good enough to carry his glove.
BTW, I seriously doubt Tango would agree that 400 AB is a large enough sample to inform the type of conclusion you’re drawing….
…man! rsrobinson, you seem to be a reasonably intelligent person, but who the hell is saying that? Dave’s post, and comments, specifically refute what you claim “some here†are saying.
I’m not talking about Dave, but about some of his more enthusiastic followers.
He’s just arguing the vaidity of the common, misperceived value of the streak as a predictive tool in making that decision. It’s amazing to me how many intelligent USSM readers do not seem to get this…..
And I agree that this is an interesting theoretical argument that may be statistically correct but I see very little chance it will ever be applied in the real world to any significant degree. No manager in baseball would sit and watch Raul Ibanez crush nine homeruns over two weeks and then bench him because there’s no proven predictive value in that performance. He wouldn’t do it for any number of real world reasons including the fact that he’d probably have a clubhouse revolt on his hands if he did.
And this is one of my criticisms of sabermetrics purism. A lot of it is extremely useful but, IMO, there’s too much of a tendency to exclude the human factor in arguing for its application in the real world where all kinds of messy variables may make it impractical or downright foolish.
That’s because YOU aren’t taking into account the real world factors that can make it work.
“Raul? We want to keep you fresh. We’ll set you down a day every week or so to keep you strong for the stretch. The last week–see what happens when you rest those hammies and shoulder?”
“Ichi? We’ll have you DH a day a week to keep YOU fresh.”
“Mr. Guillen…we’ll keep YOU fresh…”
Hm. That adds up.
Ok, maybe now I’m getting carried away, but…
Some interesting analysis on the prevailing view that Raul was “finished” before his current hot streak:
Raul’s BA on July 31: .253
Rauuuul’s BA for his career: .283
Probability (based on 1000 simulations) that a .283 hitter bats .253 or worse over his first 400 or so at-bats: 0.086 = approx. 9%
So, quantitatively, this is a fairly strong indication that the data was not generated by a .283 hitter, i.e. that Raul’s true skill had declined. Of course, Raul’s subsequent hot streak might suggest that for the first few months of the year, we were observing one of those 9% of seasons where a .283 hitter hit well below his average (
The opposition to sabermetrics will always be linked to (baseball, not political) conservatism.
No manager in baseball would sit and watch Raul Ibanez crush nine homeruns over two weeks and then bench him because there’s no proven predictive value in that performance. He wouldn’t do it for any number of real world reasons including the fact that he’d probably have a clubhouse revolt on his hands if he did.
The thing is that winning is what matters. Every once in a while, a manager or a GM will change the way baseball is seen. Yes, usually that inspiration comes from a small-market, last-place team that has less risk of failure. But baseball has changed a lot in the last ten years, and apparently crazy ideas can take root once they’re seen to work. You can actually try to use your closer in non-save situations again. You can actually bat Juan Pierre eighth instead of first even though he’s the fastest guy on the team. You get the idea.
If an idea helps teams win more games more of the time, it will eventually become accepted. Sabermetrics is the argument. Listen to the argument. Don’t just say “It’d never work, it’ll make the left fielder cry.” Besides, it’s far more interesting to talk about how to make the team better than it is to simply shout “Go M’s” two hundred and seven times per thread.
rsrobinson wrote:
First, nobody is suggesting “benching” Raul Ibanez (and that’s not what this thread is about). There is a suggestion that Jones in LF at least some of the time in place of Raul, and a reasonable platoon of Raul and Vidro at DH (again, at least some of the time) would be a better use of all three players’ skill sets and values.
Second, the reason you might “bench” Ibanez (or Vidro) isn’t because there is no predictive value in their recent past performance, but because the most reasonable/accurate projections suggest the team might benefit if you did. Again, this isn’t a “real world” argument/post, and most reasonabe people you are arguing with would concede that there are many other factors to consider before you would “bench” one of these guys.
But you seem to be accepting as a trusim (in the absence of “proof” to the contrary that could only be gathered if the manager did what you argue he shouldn’t because of the lack of that proof – play Jones more and platoon Vidro and Raul at DH some) that you should not consider these “purist” statistical arguments unless and until these guys come back to earth, which is to essentially buy into the predictive value of the streak. It won’t hurt Ibanez or Vidro to get a day off here and there (especially Raul vs. lefties), and as long as it isn’t taken too far, I don’t think there would be a clubhouse revolt. There just needs to be better balance, and ignoring the statistical argument because of it human impracticality doesn’t make the alternative more reasonable.
It won’t hurt Ibanez or Vidro to get a day off here and there (especially Raul vs. lefties), and as long as it isn’t taken too far, I don’t think there would be a clubhouse revolt. There just needs to be better balance, and ignoring the statistical argument because of it human impracticality doesn’t make the alternative more reasonable.
I’ve never said that Ibanez or Vidro shouldn’t get days off or that Jones shouldn’t be given the opportunity to play whenever possible. There’s still 40 games left and guys obviously need days off, especially considering the M’s brutal schedule down the stretch.
I used Raul Ibanez’s recent streak as an example of a guy on a hot streak (a pace of nine homeruns in thirteen games is obviously unsustainable for any length of time) because it ties into the argument here. I don’t believe anyone in the clubhouse, including Adam Jones, thinks for a second that it’s a good idea to bench a guy who’s been torching the ball like Raul has lately. If the guy was legitimately tired and needed a day off you MIGHT be able to convince him of that.
Players spend years of sweat and sacrifice, hour after hour in the batting cage, watching video, lifting weights, etc. to be able to get on a roll like Raul has been on over the past two weeks. Most would rather have their teeth pulled out with rusty pliers than be pulled from the lineup when they’re hitting like that and you’ll never, ever convince them this has no value in predicting how they’ll hit today. If you sit a guy hitting like that based on nothing more than a purist adherence to statistical probability then you risk losing not only him but the ballclub.
Willie Bloomquist probably thinks he has a 3 for 4, 3 rbi night in his bat tonight…should he start in center over Ichiro?
Seriously, motivating players is a big part of managing but it doesn’t trump the most important part of the job-fielding a group of players that gives the team it’s best chance of winning on a given night.
Just out of curiousity…do we know the name of Vidro’s agent?
FWIW I think everybody is in agreement, outside of the rsrobinson saying Ibanez and Vidro should be kept in the lineup, and AJ the one fighting for playing time. I think Ibanez and Vidro would make a fine DH combo w/ Ibanez and Jones splitting time, as well as Jones spelling Gullen and Ichiro once in a while. That gives each one of them 5-6 games a week, leveraging platoon splits as much as possible. AJ’s glove is too good (relative to Ibanez) to keep out at this point.
Julian — good stuff, although I disagree with your conclusion in 268. 9% seems low, but if you look at all hitters expected to hit near .283, I bet about 9% of them hit .253 or under in their first 400 at-bats (although it’s also likely that some without solid starting jobs were benched before they could reach 400 at-bats.) Events with low probability aren’t automatically significant when you notice them — you wouldn’t have noticed them if they didn’t happen occasionally.
And fyi, I’ve found stats articles referring to a runs-test and a runs-length test for randomness. Trying to get more info…
rsrobinson said:
I realize you didn’t – my fault. I said that because that seems to be
McLaren’s M.O. during the streak, and because you seemed to be defending McLaren’s use of the streak as a predictive factor (even if possibly only for reasons of player and clubhouse reaction).
Without necessarily disagreeing with your prediction of player reaction, the inmates don’t run the asylum. All players understand that streaks end, and if you told them “look, we’ve looked at this pretty carefully, and for most players, the fact that they’ve been rolling hot for a while doesn’t really predict going forward that they’ll do better than their usual longer-term averages, so we think we’re better off judging each coming game based on who has the best match-ups and gives us the best chance to win, rather than who’s riding a streak right now. We’ve got a brutal schedule coming up anyway, and everybody will be fresher this way.” For Raul, you would reference the fact that the team (reasonably) expects Jones will provide better defense in LF and that that will be relatively more important when certain pitchers are in the game, and that his numbers against lefties will probably determine which games he’ll sit. With Vidro, it’s a bit trickier, but he needs to understand that a guy who provides more than just singles and some OBP can be replaced by a guy like Raul at DH occasionally against RHP. You don’t really have to explain any of this to Jones, as he’s the beneficiary of all this. And none of them have to like it; it just has to work, and working provides its own justification.
In the end, if it works and you’re winning, you won’t lose anybody. If Jones isn’t hitting or is providing poorer defense that we think he will over a longer sample than the few games he’s getting here and there now, nothing says you can’t adjust. Even within games, this gives you a much better bench….
Bravo, bravo!
They are absolutely correct in The Book when they seay that people make way too much out of way too little. And that remains true for many other issues in baseball analyses besides hot and cold streaks.
And just like we really shouldn’t evaluate Raul Ibanez’ or Jose Vidro’s talent level any differently today than we did a month ago, nobody should have evaluated them differently in July as they did at the beginning of the season. Anybody that thought Ibanez was good enough to be in the starting lineup in April should have still thought so in July.
Nothing that happens over a period of time as short as a partial season should have much bearing on an opinion of talent level.