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.
The Log5 Method yields these top picks:
- 0.333 — Luis Arraez batting against Jack Flaherty.
- 0.315 — Bo Bichette batting against Lance Lynn.
- 0.294 — Bo Bichette batting against Tanner Banks.
- 0.287 — Corey Seager batting against Kutter Crawford.
- 0.284 — Emmanuel Rivera batting against Carlos Carrasco.
- 0.282 — Mauricio Dubon batting against George Kirby.
- 0.280 — Austin Hays batting against Luis Severino.
- 0.277 — Freddie Freeman batting against Johan Oviedo.
- 0.277 — Nick Castellanos batting against Shawn Armstrong.
- 0.276 — Ezequiel Duran batting against Kutter Crawford.
The Blue Jays and the White Sox play a doubleheader to make up for Wednesday’s postponement. You can double down with Bo Bichette! Banks is not a definite starter, however, and often players get one half of the twin bill off, so be careful when choosing from these games.
Here are the NN picks:
- 0.333, 0.772 — Luis Arraez batting against Jack Flaherty.
- 0.315, 0.737 — Bo Bichette batting against Lance Lynn.
- 0.294, 0.725 — Bo Bichette batting against Tanner Banks.
- 0.287, 0.706 — Corey Seager batting against Kutter Crawford.
- 0.277, 0.705 — Nick Castellanos batting against Shawn Armstrong.
- 0.277, 0.703 — Freddie Freeman batting against Johan Oviedo.
- 0.272, 0.700 — Joey Meneses batting against Brandon Williamson.
- 0.276, 0.695 — Ezequiel Duran batting against Kutter Crawford.
- 0.271, 0.694 — Harold Ramirez batting against Cristopher Sanchez.
- 0.284, 0.689 — Emmanuel Rivera batting against Carlos Carrasco.
For the second day in a row, the two systems are in excellent agreement at the top. Note that Arraez owns a six-game hit streak, but is batting “just” .292 in those six games as his batting average starts to decay. Lynn is supposed to start the early game for the White Sox, so the double down choice would by Bichette in the early game.
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!