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:
- 0.328 — Luis Arraez batting against Zack Wheeler.
- 0.319 — Corey Seager batting against Trevor Williams.
- 0.307 — Ezequiel Duran batting against Trevor Williams.
- 0.300 — Bo Bichette batting against Alex Faedo.
- 0.296 — Leody Taveras batting against Trevor Williams.
- 0.294 — Patrick Bailey batting against Austin Gomber.
- 0.292 — Austin Slater batting against Austin Gomber.
- 0.291 — Harold Castro batting against Ross Stripling.
- 0.284 — J.D. Davis batting against Austin Gomber.
- 0.281 — Randal Grichuk batting against Ross Stripling.
Nice to see Taveras working his way onto this list. In his fourth year at seasonal age 24, he improved every season, now with a .300/.346/.483 slash line. A big reason for the improvement in 2023 came from pulling his K rate below 20%. That gives his high BABIP more chances to produce hits.
Here are the NN picks:
- 0.328, 0.771 — Luis Arraez batting against Zack Wheeler.
- 0.300, 0.734 — Bo Bichette batting against Alex Faedo.
- 0.319, 0.725 — Corey Seager batting against Trevor Williams.
- 0.307, 0.714 — Ezequiel Duran batting against Trevor Williams.
- 0.296, 0.700 — Leody Taveras batting against Trevor Williams.
- 0.266, 0.699 — Freddie Freeman batting against Griffin Canning.
- 0.291, 0.698 — Harold Castro batting against Ross Stripling.
- 0.271, 0.695 — Nick Castellanos batting against Sandy Alcantara.
- 0.260, 0.691 — Joey Meneses batting against Cody Bradford.
- 0.276, 0.689 — Masataka Yoshida batting against Luis Medina.
- 0.278, 0.689 — Yonathan Daza batting against Ross Stripling.
The two systems show nice agreement on the top picks once again. Seager and Arraez have decent hit streaks going. After a three for five on Thursday, Arraez is hitting .388. Seager and Bichette tie for the consensus double down 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!