Here's the situation: midway through the season, Ted Williams '57 is putting up a line of .226/.326/.321. He normalizes very well, with a >1.200 OPS# (FYI, cap is $160M, home park is Municipal Stadium).

In your experience, do great players tend to regress to the mean and bounce back after poor starts? When do you cut your losses and trawl the WW? 81 games seems to be a decent sample size but impatience might cost me a huge 2nd half. Thoughts? Thanks!

I think you're sitting pretty for some sort of regression, but also would need a lot more detail as to the level fo pitching competion before ofering a complete answer.  The cap you're playing at is high, meaning Ted is playing against some darned good pitching. There are some players, myself not included, who belive that the sim will put in a "bad" version of a selected player.    

Thanks, redwingscup. The pitching is what you'd expect from a cap that high - lots of Pedro, Maddux, W. Johnson, Joss, Alexander, etc. Even my Ruth '23 (.248/.372/.399) and Hornsby '24 (.251/.317/.376) are struggling by their usual standards. But my deadball hitters - K. Kelly, T. Cobb, and T. O'Neill - are killing it. Having a cash infusion and three underachievers will test a man. Don't want to do anything rash, but don't want to sit on $ that could improve the team, either. How do you improve much on Ruth, Hornsby and Williams anyway???

You don't.

What's municipal  + for singles and big minus for HR's?  It's probably park effects as much as anything else. 

That's true, Trentonjoe - but Municipal is still a good XBH/hitter's park overall. Ruth, Williams and Hornsby in fact all have higher OPS at home than away. So it's not park effects.

My inclination is to be patient and wait them out. Just curious at what point (if any) others might consider a "shakeup."

He's either the best choice for your team or he isn't. Performance to date doesn't have anything to do with future performance.

No sir, every future event is independent of every prior event.  There is no greater likely hood of above average performance because the first part of the season had below average performance.

Yeah,  BUT he is likely to do better because he should do better.   

I am making #'s up here but let's assume Williams mean season under these conditions is a .280 BA (it's probably higher) with a standard deviation of .30.

His current 1st half is pretty far from where it should be and he is pretty likely to do better than he has done.  If the above #'s are right (and they aren't but they may be close) his 2nd half SHOULD fall somewhere in the 250-310 range (like 67% likely or something like that).

Statistically, he should do better because he SHOULD do better.


With that being said, there are fair amount of assumptions in my post above.    Just because you think he should be doing better doesn't mean you're right.  Many times there are factors we didn't anticipate, or don't  understand, in why someone is underperforming.

 

the only actual evidence we have about his performance in the context of THAT league is.....his performance so far in that league.  So, although the theory would be that he should perform more along the lines of his baseline performance, there may be some combination of park effects and the competition that is actually causing what you observe.  Or maybe not.

I am sure this helps a lot.

your playing against the cream of the crop pitchers, and presume you also have a similar staff.  You need to sit tight and let your guys do what you hired them to do for now.  going to the WW is so costly.

Don't be mean.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynozTOWeX1I