How to spot hot streaks?

[Garry26]

How many times has this happened to you? All the good players and breakouts are taken, but....
-Your player hits the DL and you need a temporary replacement.
-A shallow position isn't performing and you want to platoon or ride the hot hand all season.
-You need a backup player to play on days off of your starters or a multiposition player.

What you need is a guy that sucks enough to be on waivers, but is on a hot streak.
How does one spot a hot streak?

Oh sure, I can spot them after 3 weeks-1 month when it's obvious, but by then he's taken or back down to earth.

I've had bad luck this year with low priority positions like catcher, SS, & 2B. When the good players are gone, I go for Catchers with decent average & good average base stealing 2B/shortstops. However, with my problems, I need to spot hot streaks so that I can rotate guys in the true spirit of...

...rotisserie.

[Skin Blues]

This is the million dollar question.

I don't think there's any real answer other than "hindsight is 20/20". You can look for favourable matchups and healthy players, but really, the only way to identify a hot streak is after the fact. This is why it's so silly to see people say "play him while he's hot". When do you pick him up? After going 3-4 with a HR? Two games in a row with multiple hits? And then when do you stop playing him, or cut bait? After two games of being 0-4? You end up missing out the initial two games of the hot streak and get a big fat 0-8 tacked onto the end.

And then there's the issue that hot streaks really don't even exist outside of a normal distribution of events. TangoTiger did some work with this when it was brought up on Twitter by I think it was Morgan Ensberg. It was during Miguel Cabrera's hot streak a couple months ago. Here's a link to the article (a lot of the good stuff is in the comments).

[J35J]

This is the million dollar question.

I don't think there's any real answer other than "hindsight is 20/20". You can look for favourable matchups and healthy players, but really, the only way to identify a hot streak is after the fact. This is why it's so silly to see people say "play him while he's hot". When do you pick him up? After going 3-4 with a HR? Two games in a row with multiple hits? And then when do you stop playing him, or cut bait? After two games of being 0-4? You end up missing out the initial two games of the hot streak and get a big fat 0-8 tacked onto the end.

And then there's the issue that hot streaks really don't even exist outside of a normal distribution of events. TangoTiger did some work with this when it was brought up on Twitter by I think it was Morgan Ensberg. It was during Miguel Cabrera's hot streak a couple months ago. Here's a link to the article (a lot of the good stuff is in the comments).

+1

[Garry26]

I don't understand the locked-in concept.

[jfg]

I don't get how there can be an argument against being locked in or hitting in the clutch. Any person should know that when they are mentally locked in they perform better. When you start to doubt your abilities or lose focus on your job, you perform worse. It's not about being physically better at given times, it's about being psychologically prepared at given times. Obviously studies aren't going to be able to prove that these factors exist since being mentally prepared isn't going to always equate to success and I'm not claiming that other things like BABIP don't factor into a hot or cold streak. But think about your own job and how you perform when you're fully into it mentally. If you've played sports, you know how easy it is to doubt yourself and start playing like garbage because you begin to make tweaks to the way you normally play. But, when you're locked in mentally , not doubting your method of operation or thinking too hard about what's at stake, you tend to play better.

To answer the original question... I don't think the best psychologist in the world could tell you.

[Skin Blues]

I don't get how there can be an argument against being locked in or hitting in the clutch. Any person should know that when they are mentally locked in they perform better. When you start to doubt your abilities or lose focus on your job, you perform worse. It's not about being physically better at given times, it's about being psychologically prepared at given times. Obviously studies aren't going to be able to prove that these factors exist since being mentally prepared isn't going to always equate to success and I'm not claiming that other things like BABIP don't factor into a hot or cold streak. But think about your own job and how you perform when you're fully into it mentally. If you've played sports, you know how easy it is to doubt yourself and start playing like garbage because you begin to make tweaks to the way you normally play. But, when you're locked in mentally , not doubting your method of operation or thinking too hard about what's at stake, you tend to play better.

To answer the original question... I don't think the best psychologist in the world could tell you.

I bolded the important part of your post. You can't prove they exist, and you can't predict them. You can only identify them after the fact. That's the argument against being "locked in".

[jfg]

Absolutely. But, it does exist. Just because statistical evidence doesn't prove it exists doesn't mean that a person can't be locked in or clutch on any given night/week/month/year...etc. Stats can't break down psyche, if somebody finds a way to do so they will get paid a ton of money and their findings will transcend any game being played. This is why drafts are still an inexact science, why Chuck Knoblauch didn't end up a hall of famer, why signing with the Yankees isn't always the smart move, why a slump can turn into a year to forget. Stats and scouting will never be able to predict how a player pans out or how far a hot or cold streak will go.

[Skin Blues]

Absolutely. But, it does exist. Just because statistical evidence doesn't prove it exists doesn't mean that a person can't be locked in or clutch on any given night/week/month/year...etc. Stats can't break down psyche, if somebody finds a way to do so they will get paid a ton of money and their findings will transcend any game being played. This is why drafts are still an inexact science, why Chuck Knoblauch didn't end up a hall of famer, why signing with the Yankees isn't always the smart move, why a slump can turn into a year to forget. Stats and scouting will never be able to predict how a player pans out or how far a hot or cold streak will go.

Well we can, with a decent amount of certainty, predict the statline of most players based off of past performance. There is no skill whatsoever in predicting a hot streak, using any kind of past performance or weird algorithms. It's just random; it happens, we don't know why, and we don't know when. As they say in that article I posted, "It's transient, not persistent".

It's like saying "I'm on a roll at the roulette table. I bet on red 5 times in a row and doubled my money all 5 times. I'm locked in." Well, sure you were... for those 5 spins. But before those 5 spins, you had a correct-guess-average of .474, and after those 5 spins, you reverted to a correct-guess-average of .474. The absurdity of it all is just more obvious when it's put in such black and white terms (or red and black, as it were).

[Garry26]

The only thing I can think of is favorable matchups.

-Looking at hitters who face a streak of mediocre pitchers
-Looking at past performance against pitchers
-Combining the two above? A streak of sucky pitchers who you hit well against to begin with, should produce results. Right?

Similar to how you look at pitchers who may be facing bad teams. They'll obviously have better results facing the 2013 Houston Astros than they would facing a Yankee team from the late 90s early 2000s.

[Skin Blues]

Oh, definitely. You can look for favourable matchups and healthy players. But I wouldn't call that a hot streak, that's just a player at his true talent level facing weak competition.