March 02, 2007
Young Repeating
One of the reasons cited for Michael Young's long term contract is his consistency in generating hits. He's generated over two hundred hits four years in a row. That's really good. Hitters generated two hundred hit season 450 times since 1901. They've repeated that level 26% of the time (120 seasons). In other words, Young beat the odds three years in a row.
If you look at the distribution of hits players get in their post 200 hit season, the mean comes out to 174.3 and the standard deviation is 41.88. This gives us a nice way to look at the probability of Young repeating again. In other words, the chance of Young producing another 200 hit season in 2007 is about the same as his coming up with less than 150 hits. I'm going to try to play with this more later today.
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Posted by David Pinto at
08:58 AM
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[...]the chance of Young producing another 200 hit season in 2007 is about the same as his coming up with less than 150 hits
... assuming he can be equated to the average 200-hit-season player. [I know, I'm just saying.] Perhaps he can - 200-hit seasons are not that common, so guys who can do that are presumably pretty good, so maybe Young isn't any better than that pool of players.
Turning it around, the data implies that he is better at hitting for average (and staying healthy) than the average player in your pool, since the chances that the average player would do what he's done are paltry.
