arXiv subjects

Trent McCotter

Publications and source records attributed to Trent McCotter.

2 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2009

Hitting Streaks Don't Obey Your Rules: Evidence That Hitting Streaks Aren't Just By-Products of Random Variations

There have been more hitting streaks in Major League Baseball than we would expect. All batting lines of MLB hitters from 1957-2006 were randomly permuted 10,000 times and the number of hitting streaks of each length from 2 to 100 was measured. The average count of each length streak was then compared to the corresponding total from real-life, when the games were in chronological order. The number of streaks in real-life was significantly higher than over the random permutations. Non-starts (such as pinch-hitting appearances) were removed since these may be unduly reducing the number of streaks in the permutations; the number of streaks in the permutations increased but was still significantly lower than real-life totals. Possible explanations are given for why more streaks have appeared in real-life than we would expect, including possibly the hot hand idea. Contact at trentm@email.unc.edu

stat.AP↗

arXiv2009

Mutually-Antagonistic Interactions in Baseball Networks

We formulate the head-to-head matchups between Major League Baseball pitchers and batters from 1954 to 2008 as a bipartite network of mutually-antagonistic interactions. We consider both the full network and single-season networks, which exhibit interesting structural changes over time. We find interesting structure in the network and examine their sensitivity to baseball's rule changes. We then study a biased random walk on the matchup networks as a simple and transparent way to compare the performance of players who competed under different conditions and to include information about which particular players a given player has faced. We find that a player's position in the network does not correlate with his success in the random walker ranking but instead has a substantial effect on its sensitivity to changes in his own aggregate performance.

physics.data-an↗