For the past two 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. If you find this useful, please support Baseball Musings with a donation.

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.

For 2019, I am just going to publish the Log5 hit averages and the NN probabilities with parks factored in. I am keeping track of the results here. I added a graph that gives a visual representation of the probability and success each day.

First, the Log5 Method picks:

• 0.294 — Christian Yelich batting against Matt Harvey.
• 0.291 — Lorenzo Cain batting against Matt Harvey.
• 0.285 — Whit Merrifield batting against Marco Gonzales.
• 0.279 — Wilson Ramos batting against Kyle Gibson.
• 0.275 — Trey Mancini batting against Brett Anderson.
• 0.272 — Jonathan Villar batting against Brett Anderson.
• 0.271 — Elvis Andrus batting against Zack Greinke.
• 0.268 — Hernan Perez batting against Matt Harvey.
• 0.266 — Benjamin Gamel batting against Matt Harvey.
• 0.265 — David Peralta batting against Mike Minor.

Yelich and Cain certainly turned the Brewers around. Both have regressed hit averages of .274 this season. Even though both draw a decent number of walks, they collect so many hits that they still come out near the top. Harvey allowed 14 hits in 10 innings this year, so it is a good match-up. Both hit Harvey well in their careers, with Yelich having a much larger sample size.

Here are the neural network picks:

• 0.294, 0.707 — Christian Yelich batting against Matt Harvey.
• 0.285, 0.704 — Whit Merrifield batting against Marco Gonzales.
• 0.291, 0.703 — Lorenzo Cain batting against Matt Harvey.
• 0.279, 0.701 — Wilson Ramos batting against Kyle Gibson.
• 0.265, 0.692 — David Peralta batting against Mike Minor.
• 0.260, 0.690 — Jean Segura batting against Stephen Strasburg.
• 0.250, 0.684 — Jose Altuve batting against Jonathan Loaisiga.
• 0.271, 0.681 — Elvis Andrus batting against Zack Greinke.
• 0.264, 0.680 — Dee Gordon batting against Jakob Junis.
• 0.247, 0.679 — Freddie Freeman batting against German Marquez.

Cain and Merrifield tie for the consensus second pick.

I do not guarantee results. Your best pick is going to have about a 25% chance of not getting a hit. Good luck!