The Hot Hand in Sports

The Colorado Rockies won again today, 5-4 over Pittsburgh, giving the Denver-based franchise 16 wins in its last 17 games (game-by-game log). The spurt started about a week after Colorado fired manager Clint Hurdle and replaced him with Jim Tracy. As a managerial firing would suggest, the Rockies got off to a terrible start this season. From April 11-25, the team dropped 10 out of 12. As a further indication of how poorly the Rockies started the season, even with all their recent success they still trail the first-place L.A. Dodgers in the National League West by 9.5 games!

Kayla Braud of Eugene, Oregon finished her high-school softball career by getting a hit in 103 straight games. Even if, as is probably the case, her talent level is way above that of the pitchers she faced, you figure walks or a lucky catch by the opposition somewhere along the line would have ended her streak! (article, video).

Ichiro Suzuki's 27-game hitting streak, which I blogged about yesterday, is gone, just like that!

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Randy Smith, who once held the NBA record for consecutive games played at 906, has died at age 60.

Seattle Mariner outfielder Ichiro Suzuki has now gotten a hit in 27 straight games, heading into tonight's action (Twins at Mariners). Though far away, to be sure, from Joe DiMaggio's record 56-game hitting streak, Ichiro is considered by some writers to be among the major-leaguers most capable of going on a long streak. For one thing, he's gone on several streaks of 20-or-more games during his career. Further, he rarely walks, which maximizes the number of official at-bats (and thus chances to extend the streak) he gets in each game. With amazing regularity, Ichiro has been drawing almost exactly 50 walks per season in recent years. This article from a few days ago (when Ichiro's streak was at 25 games) provides additional background.

Today is the 20th anniversary of a 22-inning game between the Los Angeles Dodgers and Houston Astros (box score). Houston ultimately won, 5-4. From a streakiness perspective, the thing I've always remembered about this game is L.A.'s John Shelby going 0-for-10.

Looking at Shelby's career statistics, he clearly had a bad year with the bat in 1989, hitting only .183. (63-for-345). A .183 batting average translates into a .817 (i.e., 1 - . 183) failure rate on each at-bat. Raising .817 to the 10th power, for the probability of 10 successive failures (assuming independence of events), yields .133 as the likelihood of Shelby's going 0-for-10. We have not, of course, taken into account the quality of the opposing pitchers or any other factors, so this will have to be a rough estimate.

A 13% chance of Shelby going 0-for-10 is not astronomically small by any means. It's still fairly rare, however. The following figure shows Shelby's probabilities of getting 0, 1, 2, 3, etc., hits out of 10 at-bats. Not surprisingly, the likeliest scenarios were for him to get 1 or 2 hits. For the probability of 1 hit (and 9 failures), for example, we would take .817 to the 9th power, then multiply the result by .183, thus yielding .0297. There are 10 different ways to get exactly 1 hit out of 10 (i.e., in the first at-bat, or in the second, ... , or in the 10th), so we multiply .0297 X 10, yielding .297 (which is shown in the figure).


Shelby also had a higher probability of getting 3 hits in the game than 0 hits, but the chances start tailing off once we get to 4 hits. The above probabilities were obtained from the Vassar Binomial Calculator.

The first six games Roger Federer served Monday at the French Open, he won each at love. In other words, he won a perfect 24-of-24 points on his serve to open the match. Yet, Federer lost the first set. He could not break the serve of his opponent, Tommy Haas, and Haas prevailed in the first-set tie-breaker. Ultimately, Federer prevailed, 6-7, 5-7, 6-4, 6-0, 6-2.

Tennis great Rafael Nadal had his 31-match winning streak at the French Open halted. As one of the Grand Slam tournaments (along with Wimbledon, and the U.S. and Australian Opens), the French Open has a 128-player draw for men's (and women's) singles. A player therefore must win seven straight matches to take the French championship in a given year. Nadal had won the last four men's singles championships, plus his first three matches this year.

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In NCAA men's regional baseball action, the University of Texas beat Boston College, 3-2, in an amazing 25-inning game. Perhaps even more remarkable than the overall length of the game, Longhorn reliever Austin Wood pitched 12-plus innings of no-hit ball!

The Detroit News has an article on the 25th anniversary of the 1984 Detroit Tigers' 35-5 start to the season (thanks to Mark Pattison for bringing the article to my attention).

Boston Red Sox slugger David "Big Papi" Ortiz finally ended his long homerless streak.

Two long baseball streaks ended today:

Howard College, which came into today's round of the National Junior College Athletic Association baseball regionals with a 57-0 record, lost to Temple College, 8-2. Howard is still alive under the double-elimination format, but the chance at a virtually unheard-of undefeated baseball season is gone. [UPDATE: Howard indeed went on to win the national JC title.]

The Washington Nationals' Ryan Zimmerman had his 30-game hitting streak ended today against San Francisco, going 0-for-3.

I've just created a Facebook group in conjunction with this blog, and I invite everybody to join. The Facebook group will be a venue for getting previews of analyses I'm working on, batting around ideas, sharing instances of sports streakiness any of us have recently seen, etc. In short, it will be for exchanging brief bits of information that might not warrant full postings on the blog. Just search within Facebook under "Hot Hand in Sports."

High school softball pitcher Rachele Fico recently threw her 22nd career perfect game. In one of her more recent perfect games, she struck out all 21 opposing hitters (softball games are seven innings long).

NCAA Division II player Bo Darby of West Virginia State homered in five straight at-bats recently, part of a lengthier power-hitting exhibition that included a total of six home runs in a double-header and a single and double right before the homer barrage even started.

ESPN "Rise," an outlet for coverage of up-and-coming high school athletes, reports on Florida prep Patrick Schuster's quest for a fifth straight no-hitter today. The high school record is six.

UPDATE: The streak is over.

I'm a few days late in reporting this, but Kansas City pitcher Zack Greinke had his scoreless innings streak come to an end.

Kansas City Royals pitcher Zack Greinke has now thrown 34 consecutive scoreless innings, carrying over from the end of last season.

The ESPN.com blog True Hoop, by Henry Abbott, had a major write-up the other day about the study of streak shooting in basketball (including a cite of the Hot Hand blog). The accompanying hot-hand study from Sportsmetricians is also worth reading.

Angel Cabrera won the Masters golf tournament today, defeating Chad Campbell and Kenny Perry in a three-way playoff. The streakiest performances, however, were by two players who lifted themselves considerably in the standings, but not quite far enough to make the playoff. Phil Mickelson birdied six out of seven holes early in the fourth round, whereas first-time Masters contestant John Merrick birdied four straight late in the fourth round.

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Earlier in the day, I randomly stumbled upon a televised women's bowling event, just as one of the competitors, Carolyn Dorin-Ballard, was in the midst of a streak that ultimately stretched to 20 consecutive strikes. The streak was said to be the longest in a televised Professional Bowlers Association event.

UPDATE: I have now found an online article documenting Dorin-Ballard's new record.

Oklahoma's pitchers shut out Texas Tech for 20 straight innings in Big 12 baseball action, before the Red Raiders scored in the third inning of Game 3 of the teams' series. The Sooners won the first two games, 6-0 and 4-0, but Texas Tech took the finale, 5-1.

In the opening round of the Masters golf tournament earlier today, Chad Campbell set a tournament record by getting a birdie on the first five holes.

UPDATE: To probe a little more into Campbell's opening-round performance, I decided to estimate the probability of his five straight birdies (assuming that he's a typical golfer). A total of 96 golfers began play. For each of the holes in Round 1 -- including the first five, which were of primary interest -- the number of golfers who broke par (most frequently by birdie, but also occasionally by eagle) is available here. The numbers of par-busters for each hole, which when divided by 96 yields a probability of breaking par, are as follows:

Hole..........Par-Busters..........Probability

1.............7 (all birdie)............07

2.............46 (incl. 2 eagles).......48

3.............30 (incl. 1 eagle)........31

4.............4 (all birdie)............04

5.............11 (all birdie)...........11

Multiplying these probabilities together yields roughly .00005, which is 5-in-100,000 or 1-in-20,000.

Some cautions must attach to this probability. First, it was a post-hoc decision to calculate it. To paraphrase a warning I once received from a prominent statistician, no one presumably was asking before the tournament, "What are the odds that Chad Campbell is going to birdie his first five holes?" The very unusualness of the accomplishment is what prompted me to analyze it.

Second, even if we accept the 1-in-20,000 probability, with large numbers of professional golfers playing large numbers of holes in large numbers of tournaments, the feat of five straight birdies is one that may be expected to occur every so often.