Apology

We suffered from both a power failure and an internet outage this morning, and I was unable to run Beat the Streak picks. My apologies.

It does give me a chance to respond publicly to a letter from a loyal reader, which came in Saturday night:

Altuve went hitless tonight, which is kind of a big deal. It’s the first time since May 2016 that he’s gone hitless in 3 consecutive home games.

I was thinking of picking him to extend my BTS streak today and I noticed he’s been hitless in his past 2 home games. So I checked to see how long since he went hitless for 3 straight home games. I decided it was a very low risk that he’d go hitless tonight, so I picked him. LOL and of course tonight he actually goes hitless for a 3rd straight home game.

One thing they teach you very early in probability class is that the probability of an independent event has nothing to do with the previous run of events. If the roulette wheel comes up red ten times in a row, the probability of it coming up red on the next spin is still close to 1/2. For baseball players, plate appearance and games may not be independent events, but they are pretty close. You probably do better ignoring the streak and just working off the long-term probabilities.

from baseballmusings.com https://ift.tt/2IAKFnP