For the past few years Baseball Musings tried to help with playing Beat the Streak. The Day by Day Database keeps track of hit streak of at least five games. In addition, two programs produce top ten lists of players with a high probability of a hit.
Here are the top picks my programs produced for use in Beat the Streak. This post mostly explains the ideas behind the calculations. In addition, this post shows tests on the Neural Network (NN). This post discusses an NN that includes the ballpark. I updated the models, and the results of those tests are here.
The Log5 Method yields these top picks:
- 0.319 — Manny Machado batting against Kyle Hendricks.
- 0.310 — Tim Anderson batting against Zach Plesac.
- 0.302 — Eric Hosmer batting against Kyle Hendricks.
- 0.280 — Luis Robert batting against Zach Plesac.
- 0.275 — Ty France batting against Ranger Suarez.
- 0.273 — Austin Hays batting against Carlos Hernandez.
- 0.273 — Nick Castellanos batting against Chris Flexen.
- 0.270 — Freddie Freeman batting against Jose Quintana.
- 0.268 — J.P. Crawford batting against Ranger Suarez.
- 0.268 — Jean Segura batting against Chris Flexen.
Machado leads the majors with a .385 BA. He is four for nine career against Hendricks with no strikeouts.
Here are the NN picks:
- 0.310, 0.731 — Tim Anderson batting against Zach Plesac.
- 0.319, 0.716 — Manny Machado batting against Kyle Hendricks.
- 0.302, 0.696 — Eric Hosmer batting against Kyle Hendricks.
- 0.280, 0.690 — Luis Robert batting against Zach Plesac.
- 0.267, 0.689 — Trea Turner batting against Jose Quintana.
- 0.270, 0.679 — Freddie Freeman batting against Jose Quintana.
- 0.273, 0.679 — Nick Castellanos batting against Chris Flexen.
- 0.275, 0.674 — Ty France batting against Ranger Suarez.
- 0.268, 0.669 — Jean Segura batting against Chris Flexen.
- 0.263, 0.665 — Andrew Benintendi batting against Tyler Wells.
Anderson and Machado are the consensus double down picks. If you want to base it on success against the starting pitcher, Anderson is just 4 for 21 against Plesac, with five strikeouts. Two of the those hits were home runs. Please remember that any batter-pitcher match-up is a small sample size.
Note that if you want to pick someone from the game in Baltimore or the game in New York, those are early afternoon starts.
You can follow the NN results on this spreadsheet. I do not guarantee results. Your best pick is going to have about a 25% chance of not getting a hit. Good luck!