For the past few 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.
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.
Here are the Log5 Method picks:
- 0.362 — Vladimir Guerrero Jr. batting against Matt Harvey.
- 0.351 — Teoscar Hernandez batting against Matt Harvey.
- 0.350 — Bo Bichette batting against Matt Harvey.
- 0.340 — Buster Posey batting against Zach Eflin.
- 0.335 — Marcus Semien batting against Matt Harvey.
- 0.332 — Lourdes Gurriel batting against Matt Harvey.
- 0.330 — Randal Grichuk batting against Matt Harvey.
- 0.330 — Adam Frazier batting against Sam Hentges.
- 0.325 — Michael Brantley batting against Dallas Keuchel.
- 0.323 — Raimel Tapia batting against Eric Lauer.
Coming into the season, Matt Harvey worked on improving his mechanics and supposedly found some new movement. It seems to be pretty much for naught. Batters are hanging a .354 BABIP on him, his strikeout rate has not improved, and he still gives up a lot of homers. The Log5 Method is telling us that anyone of the Blue Jays is a good pick today.
Here are the NN picks:
- 0.362, 0.746 — Vladimir Guerrero Jr. batting against Matt Harvey.
- 0.350, 0.739 — Bo Bichette batting against Matt Harvey.
- 0.323, 0.736 — Raimel Tapia batting against Eric Lauer.
- 0.340, 0.732 — Buster Posey batting against Zach Eflin.
- 0.351, 0.732 — Teoscar Hernandez batting against Matt Harvey.
- 0.318, 0.720 — Donovan Solano batting against Zach Eflin.
- 0.320, 0.719 — Yonathan Daza batting against Eric Lauer.
- 0.330, 0.719 — Adam Frazier batting against Sam Hentges.
- 0.332, 0.718 — Lourdes Gurriel batting against Matt Harvey.
- 0.273, 0.716 — Ketel Marte batting against Tony Gonsolin.
Guerrero is now second in the batting title race to Michael Brantley of the Astros, but Guerrero may move back in front today base on these predictions. Bichette is the consensus second choice.
You can follow the NN results on this spreadsheet. I do not guarantee results. Your best pick is going to have about a 25% chance of not getting a hit. Good luck!