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 projected hit averages against starting pitchers:
- 0.349 — Jackson Merrill batting against German Marquez.
- 0.343 — Luis Arraez batting against German Marquez.
- 0.330 — Manny Machado batting against German Marquez.
- 0.327 — Fernando Tatis Jr. batting against German Marquez.
- 0.303 — Bobby Witt Jr. batting against Lucas Giolito.
- 0.292 — Jose Iglesias batting against German Marquez.
- 0.292 — Gavin Sheets batting against German Marquez.
- 0.292 — Aaron Judge batting against Luis Severino.
- 0.291 — Elias Diaz batting against German Marquez.
- 0.291 — Austin Riley batting against Carmen Mlodzinski.
It looks like another great day for the Padres in Colorado. Their 21-0 win over Colorado on Saturday set a team record for largest margin of victory.
The 21 runs in a shutout victory are only one behind the record (since 1900) of 22, held by Cleveland (over the Yankees) in 2004 and Pittsburgh (over the Cubs) in 1975.
• Kolek matched the record (since 1900) for largest individual shutout. Red Ruffing in 1939 and Ed Siever in 1901 also pitched 21-0 shutouts.
MLB.com
Machado hits Marquez well. Tatis and Arraez had little success against him, Arraez 0 for 5 with two walks.
The NN produces this list of batters with a high probability of collecting at least one hit:
- 0.343, 0.757 — Luis Arraez batting against German Marquez.
- 0.349, 0.756 — Jackson Merrill batting against German Marquez.
- 0.303, 0.724 — Bobby Witt Jr. batting against Lucas Giolito.
- 0.330, 0.720 — Manny Machado batting against German Marquez.
- 0.292, 0.717 — Aaron Judge batting against Luis Severino.
- 0.327, 0.716 — Fernando Tatis Jr. batting against German Marquez.
- 0.287, 0.703 — Jacob Wilson batting against Clarke Schmidt.
- 0.275, 0.692 — Brendan Donovan batting against MacKenzie Gore.
- 0.279, 0.690 — Amed Rosario batting against Miles Mikolas.
- 0.263, 0.689 — Trea Turner batting against Luis Ortiz.
Arraez and Merrill tie for consensus top pick. Machado is tied for longest current hit streak in the majors with ten.
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!
I have one question for you David.
I observed that there are 603 players picked through 5/10/25. When your models agree on a player, you have 297 observations for a 73.38% success rate. There are 442 players that have neural net probabilities (neural net only or both), yet only 4 players have a probability of .730 or higher. Does that strike you as odd?
Would you expect more than 4 observations at the 73% level, with a denominator of either 297 or 442, especially when the average odds in the 297 is .7338? Does it take a while for your model to “ramp up” every season at the start? because they are all in May too. Is there a way to combat this?
5/3/2025 0.309 0.738 Arraez,Luis
5/3/2025 0.326 0.732 Judge,Aaron
5/9/2025 0.358 0.759 Arraez,Luis
5/9/2025 0.357 0.750 Merrill,Jackson
One of the parameters to the NN is the league hit average for the season. The hit average for the training data was around .230, and that is the long term hit average for the majors.
The first few weeks of the season, the hit average for the league was abysmally low, around .206. Combine that with large regressions of small in season sample sizes to that low average and you get two lower than normal parameters going into the model.
Hit average as of today is .217, so it’s come up quite a lot in a few weeks. We should be seeing higher probabilities going forward.
Thanks so much for posting these beat the streak daily picks. This is making my baseball watching (and small time wagering) so much more fun!