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:
- 0.325 — Jose Ramirez batting against Patrick Corbin.
- 0.323 — Luis Arraez batting against Michael Wacha.
- 0.319 — Alec Bohm batting against Miles Mikolas.
- 0.317 — David Fry batting against Patrick Corbin.
- 0.317 — Andres Gimenez batting against Patrick Corbin.
- 0.303 — J.T. Realmuto batting against Miles Mikolas.
- 0.301 — Josh Naylor batting against Patrick Corbin.
- 0.299 — Will Brennan batting against Patrick Corbin.
- 0.297 — Shohei Ohtani batting against Dakota Hudson.
- 0.293 — Mookie Betts batting against Dakota Hudson.
The Guardians get to celebrate Corbin day. Ramirez owns a low strikeout rate for his career, and this season he walks less as well. He puts plenty of balls in play, and lately they’ve been finding holes.
The NN produces this list of batters with a high probability of collecting a hit:
- 0.323, 0.762 — Luis Arraez batting against Michael Wacha.
- 0.319, 0.713 — Alec Bohm batting against Miles Mikolas.
- 0.297, 0.705 — Shohei Ohtani batting against Dakota Hudson.
- 0.325, 0.705 — Jose Ramirez batting against Patrick Corbin.
- 0.293, 0.702 — Mookie Betts batting against Dakota Hudson.
- 0.290, 0.700 — Jose Altuve batting against Pablo Lopez.
- 0.279, 0.694 — Freddie Freeman batting against Dakota Hudson.
- 0.317, 0.692 — Andres Gimenez batting against Patrick Corbin.
- 0.285, 0.690 — Mauricio Dubon batting against Pablo Lopez.
- 0.290, 0.689 — Jeremy Pena batting against Pablo Lopez.
Arraez is four for thirteen against Wacha, .308, with two home runs! He also struck out twice, so Arraez is good against Wacha, but in an atypical way for the hitter.
Anthony Volpe saw his hit streak end on Thursday, putting Masyn Winn at 18 and J.T. Realmuto at 17 on top of the list of longest current streaks.
Arraez stands as the consensus top pick with Bohm and Ramirez tied for the consensus double down choice.