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:
- 0.310 — Mookie Betts batting against Tommy Henry.
- 0.306 — Luis Arraez batting against Jake Irvin.
- 0.303 — Trea Turner batting against Griffin Canning.
- 0.303 — Alec Bohm batting against Griffin Canning.
- 0.293 — Shohei Ohtani batting against Tommy Henry.
- 0.288 — Will Smith batting against Tommy Henry.
- 0.287 — Freddie Freeman batting against Tommy Henry.
- 0.280 — Kerry Carpenter batting against Steven Matz.
- 0.279 — Luis Garcia batting against Trevor Rogers.
- 0.276 — Adley Rutschman batting against Clarke Schmidt.
Bohm, Rutschman, Betts, and Freeman all have current hit streak of at least eight games. Bohm at twelve games leads the majors.
The NN produces this list of high probabilities:
- 0.306, 0.740 — Luis Arraez batting against Jake Irvin.
- 0.310, 0.717 — Mookie Betts batting against Tommy Henry.
- 0.303, 0.708 — Trea Turner batting against Griffin Canning.
- 0.303, 0.708 — Alec Bohm batting against Griffin Canning.
- 0.287, 0.703 — Freddie Freeman batting against Tommy Henry.
- 0.293, 0.694 — Shohei Ohtani batting against Tommy Henry.
- 0.250, 0.686 — Michael Harris II batting against Bryce Miller.
- 0.272, 0.681 — Ryan O’Hearn batting against Clarke Schmidt.
- 0.279, 0.681 — Luis Garcia batting against Trevor Rogers.
- 0.288, 0.678 — Will Smith batting against Tommy Henry.
Now that hitters plate appearance start exceeding 100 PA for the season, the short term hit average gets regressed less, and we’re starting to see more probabilities over .700. Arraez and Betts are the consensus double down choices.
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!