Posted by apollo7 on 6/18/2010 5:30:00 PM (view original):
Hot streaks and cold streaks are part of baseball. I see a way to implement this as follows:
Replace the "patience" rating with a "consistancy" rating. Players with high consistancy do not go on hot or cold streaks, while playes with low consistancy do. In practice there would be a hidden modifier to a player's rating that slowly goes up or down during the season, but only at the ML level. The consistancy rating would determine the maximum high and low of the modifier and how fast it changes. A player that is demoted to the minors would get their modifier reset to 0.
Also, I would have ALL new draftees start with very low consistancy ratings, and have potential for very high consistancy ratings.
Things this would accomplish:
1) Veteran players would become more valuable because their consistancy ratings should have maxed out and be very high.
2) Higher risk for rushing a player to the majors. That 21 year old stud that only spent 2 years in the minors may have major league skills by now, but he will be wildly inconsistant and may need a trip or two to the minors to refine things when he goes in a slump.
3) Stats become more important, as you must use your analysis of a player's statistics to determine if they are on a hot streak or cold streak, and adjust your lineup accordingly.
4) Better story lines. A rookie phenom burst on the scene and grabs headlines, because he starts off on a hot streak and stays there. Or a high profile rookie stuggles while he bounces up and down between the majors and AAA trying to find his groove.
I'm sure that others could expound on this and fine tune the idea...
There is significant research showing that hot and cold streaks for hitters are most likely nothing more than random
"Another interesting question is on the existence of streakiness in hitting data. During a season it is observed that some ballplayers will experience periods of ``hot" hitting where they will get a high proportion of hits. Other hitters will go through slumps or periods of hitting with very few hits. But these periods of hot and cold hitting may be just a reflection of the natural variability observed in coin tossing. Is there statistical evidence for a ``hot hand" among baseball hitters where the probability of obtain a hit is dependent on recent at-bats? Albright (1993) looked at a large collection of baseball hitting data and used a number of statistics such as the number of runs to detect streakiness in hitting data. His main conclusion was that there little statistical evidence generally for a hot hand in baseball hitting."
http://www-math.bgsu.edu/~albert/papers/saber.html
I know it shakes up a lot of world views but there is simply no evidence for streakiness in hitters, same thing with shooters in the NBA. A player is no more likely to make his next shot after making a shot than after missing one after accounting for his actual ability and type of shot. The streaks we see are simply random, much like streaks in the flipping of a coin. There is no predicting a player will outperform his true ability level moving forward.
So yeah, we don't need streaks...we already have them in the form of randomness