Via Hardball Talk, new research shows that baseball players do go on hot streaks:

Green and Zwiebel studied two million MLB at-bats from 2000 to 2011. They neutralized for the abilities of the hitter and pitchers — such as lefty-on-lefty matchups and stadium sizes — and focused on 10 major statistical categories, such as batting averages, home run percentages and strikeout rates.

They found that a hitter’s past 25 at-bats were a significant predictor of his next at-bat. When a player is hot, they found his expected on-base percentage to be 25 to 30 points higher than it would if he were cold. Home run rates jumped 30 percent and strikeout rates dropped. For pitchers in hot streaks, future performance was improved, too.

Of course, neither site links to the original paper, downloadable here. One of the points of the paper is that the lack of a hot hand in basketball is due to adjustments on defense to the hot player, something that is difficult to do in baseball. I’ve just had time to skim the paper, but it looks very interesting. From a quick reading, I’m not sure I like how they handle walks, but I want to give it a more thorough reading before confirming that feeling.

To me, a hot or cold streak should be related to something. The batter or pitcher made an adjustment. Very often we find that a player going through a cold spell was hurt. some coach makes what seems like a minor adjustment to mechanics, and the player takes off. Jose Bautista and Sammy Sosa drastically changed their careers mid-stream by making adjustments in their approach at the plate. (Sosa seemed to make adjustments outside of any chemical help that he received.) When I worked at ESPN, the analysts were almost always able to find a change in approach for the batters between a cold streak and a hot streak, often as easy as keeping their head on the ball.

My guess, also, is that the adjustments that are made quickly in basketball defensively are made more slowly by the opposing pitchers. Twenty five at bats is about five games, so it takes a while to tell that a team should change their approach to a batter or a pitcher. Again, if you have two years of data on cold and hot zones for a batter, there is reason to stick to that longer than a few games of hot hitting. We see this all the time with rookies. Pitchers up and down the league challenge them with fastballs, often for half a season or more, until the batters prove they can handle the pitch. Then, when the league adjusts, it’s called a sophomore slump.

I’m looking forward to reading the whole article tonight.