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:
- 0.376 — Luis Arraez batting against Trevor Rogers.
- 0.305 — Jurickson Profar batting against Trevor Rogers.
- 0.295 — Jackson Merrill batting against Trevor Rogers.
- 0.290 — Shohei Ohtani batting against Tylor Megill.
- 0.288 — Donovan Solano batting against Trevor Rogers.
- 0.288 — William Contreras batting against Justin Steele.
- 0.287 — Luis Campusano batting against Trevor Rogers.
- 0.285 — Mookie Betts batting against Tylor Megill.
- 0.280 — Manny Machado batting against Trevor Rogers.
- 0.280 — Connor Wong batting against Cole Irvin.
Arraez faces his former team today. Rogers owns a decent K rate and a high walk rate, so in general batters don’t put the ball in play a lot against him. This season, when they do, the BABIP is .368. That’s high, but for his career his BABIP is at .327. In general, it looks like a good day for the Padres.
The NN produces this list of batters with a high probability of collecting a hit:
- 0.376, 0.786 — Luis Arraez batting against Trevor Rogers.
- 0.290, 0.704 — Shohei Ohtani batting against Tylor Megill.
- 0.288, 0.703 — William Contreras batting against Justin Steele.
- 0.285, 0.698 — Mookie Betts batting against Tylor Megill.
- 0.267, 0.686 — Freddie Freeman batting against Tylor Megill.
- 0.269, 0.685 — Michael Harris II batting against Mitchell Parker.
- 0.276, 0.684 — Ezequiel Tovar batting against Xzavion Curry.
- 0.272, 0.683 — Salvador Perez batting against Joe Ryan.
- 0.275, 0.683 — Elias Diaz batting against Xzavion Curry.
- 0.280, 0.679 — Connor Wong batting against Cole Irvin.
Arraez’s .786 is the highest probability seen this season. The rests of the Padres do not make his list, so Ohtani is 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!
HI,
was wondering if you knew the difference between your calculation of percentage odds a play will get a hit, versus mlb.com’s beat the streak odds of a player getting a hit. Today, you say Luis Arraez has a 78.6% chance of getting a hit, highest all season. MLB.com,
https://www.mlb.com/apps/beat-the-streak/game/players/455/
66% for Luis Arraez. That is a big gap, was wondering if you could explain it?
MLB has not made their algorithm public. I thought maybe they looked at batter versus pitcher, but Arraez is 7 for 18 against Williams.