I'm 100 games into one of the worst underperformances I've seen. It's in a 1989 single season progressive. In my experience, single season progs have been friendly to the batters, producing some good offensive numbers. Enter Rafael Palmeiro.

Real life: 632 PA .275/.354/.374

SIM so far: 339 PA, .198/.286/.242

While no one would expect him to be a superstar, he should be a solid #2 hitter for my lineup. Instead, this is one of the most frustrating performances I've had in my 7+ years on this site, and I'm starting to consider platooning some AAA guys to DH in his place. Maybe it's just karma for many of the superior performances I've had in the past...

One of you stat experts: is this still within a reasonable statistical variance, or is something weird going on here? No one else on my team with significant PA stands out as way above or way below what I've come to expect after several years of experience.

Using simple p chart limits, assuming expected performance mirroring RL, your upper and lower limits at a 95% Confidence would be

.324/ .406 / .426
.226/ .302 / .322

At 99.7% confidence the limits would be:

.348/ .432 / .452
.202/ .276 / .296

Keep in mind such confidence is really only applicable if a batter had a .275 chance of a hit on every AB and a .354 chance of reaching base every PA. Of course the sim doesn't work like that and this model underestimates variance. Also, I really don't know you'd league details. How many teams were there in real life? How many in the progressive? What park?

So given that you should reasonably expect RL performance (and I'm unsure if that is true) the bottom line is that it seems that this player is getting exceptionally unlucky, probably amongst the unluckiest in your league. But even so, from a pure statistical standpoint, it looks like it could just be luck (or variance).

Thanks, zubinsum, I hoped there might be someone who could plug the numbers in.

Here's the league if you have any interest in studying it further: https://www.whatifsports.com/mlb-l/view.asp?lid=114413

I guess even something that happens less than .3% of the time will actually happen from time to time...

like I indicated before, the limits I gave were pretty conservative... So I don't think you are really beyond those 99.7% limits... I am guessing than kind of performance happens once every ~200 times. Pretty unlucky, but not mind bogglingly so.

Banks is RH.
Kaline is RH.
Cey is RH.
Right handed hitters tend to underperfom quite a bit (there are exceptions, i.e. Cravath).