SPRING 2024

AUTHOR

Ryan Feder, The Dalton School

ABSTRACT

Streakiness and baseball go hand in hand, but accurately measuring streakiness and consistency in sports is difficult. While studying hitting streaks is an old idea, relatively few works have examined streaks for hitters at the pitch outcome granularity, or for pitchers more generally. Furthermore, little is understood about how streaks correlate with more traditional player outcomes.

In this work, we utilize permutation tests, which we use to apply two metrics to four outcomes of interest from the perspective of both hitters and pitchers in order to quantify internal player streakiness in a holistic manner. This method is used to study the streakiness and consistency of the 136 batters and 127 pitchers during the 2023 Major League Baseball season, and study the association between streakiness/consistency and traditional player statistics.

Our findings suggest that league-wide trends in pitcher outcomes are slightly streakier than those of hitters, and that consistency for both player types is moderately correlated with traditional measures of player success. Finally, our approach identifies Ronald Acuña, the unanimous 2023 National League Most Valuable Player, as a model of consistency, demonstrating the utility of a holistic approach to player streakiness evaluation.