Pick 57

On Friday, MLB.com offers a special Beat the Streak contest, Beat the Streak in a Day. You pick 57 hitters, and if all of them record a hit, you win $5.6 million.

Note that this is tougher than the regular game. On a daily basis, you get to choose someone who is very likely to get a hit. In this game, you will need to pick down to the 20th percentile.

Just to give you an idea of the enormity of the task, the 2017 season produced 98 days in which at least 70 batters started a game. On those 98 days, the highest percentage of starters getting a hit was 74.4%, the lowest was 54.2%, and the median was 64.6%. The average of those days came in at 64.9%. With about 255 batters starting that means there are about 165 batters who will get hits that day.

That seems like it gives one a decent chance of winning but I figure the probability at around 2.0*E-11. So how to choose? Tomorrow I will take the list of players generated by the NN, then go down it and roll two six sided dice. If the roll is 2 through seven, or an 11 I pick the player. If not, I skip the player. So I’m basically taking a random sample from the top 88 players. It shouldn’t matter much, but I will be interested in seeing how it does against picking the top 57.

Tomorrow I will post the full NN result on a Google sheet and share it.

from baseballmusings.com http://ift.tt/2t6BS6i