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:
- 0.336 — Michael Brantley batting against Jaime Barria.
- 0.329 — Nick Castellanos batting against J.A. Happ.
- 0.310 — Yulieski Gurriel batting against Jaime Barria.
- 0.306 — Kyle Tucker batting against Jaime Barria.
- 0.306 — Bryan Reynolds batting against Patrick Corbin.
- 0.299 — Yordan Alvarez batting against Jaime Barria.
- 0.299 — Colin Moran batting against Patrick Corbin.
- 0.298 — Aledmys Diaz batting against Jaime Barria.
- 0.295 — Cedric Mullins II batting against Steven Matz.
- 0.294 — Alex Bregman batting against Jaime Barria.
Brantley hasn’t made the top of the list for a while. He’s hitting .312 with a .333 OBP in September, so I suspect his hit average went up a bit.
Here are the NN picks:
- 0.336, 0.747 — Michael Brantley batting against Jaime Barria.
- 0.329, 0.731 — Nick Castellanos batting against J.A. Happ.
- 0.286, 0.722 — Ketel Marte batting against Yusei Kikuchi.
- 0.264, 0.711 — Trea Turner batting against Blake Snell.
- 0.310, 0.710 — Yulieski Gurriel batting against Jaime Barria.
- 0.281, 0.707 — Luis Robert batting against Nick Pivetta.
- 0.295, 0.705 — Cedric Mullins II batting against Steven Matz.
- 0.306, 0.705 — Kyle Tucker batting against Jaime Barria.
- 0.277, 0.703 — Bo Bichette batting against Zac Lowther.
- 0.306, 0.702 — Bryan Reynolds batting against Patrick Corbin.
The systems agree on Brantley and Castellanos as the double down picks.
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!