The Hot Hand in Sports

Ichiro Suzuki's streak of consecutive 200-hit seasons is about to end at 10.

Nate Silver, who has written mainly about politics in recent years, returns to his baseball roots, examining where in history the September collapse of the Boston Red Sox ranks.

Defending national college-football champion Auburn had its 17-game winning streak snapped today, with a 38-24 loss to Clemson. Auburn, which started off 2-0 this season, was 14-0 last season and had closed out the 2009 season with a bowl win.

Texas Tech quarterback Seth Doege had the hot hand in leading the Red Raiders to a 59-13 win at New Mexico. According to this game article:

Doege tied a school record by completing his first 15 passes en route to finishing 40 for 44 -- a 90.9 completion percentage, a national record for quarterbacks with at least 40 completions.

With yesterday's loss to the St. Louis Cardinals, baseball's Pittsburgh Pirates clinched their 19th straight season with a losing (i.e., sub-.500) record. Among major North American sports leagues, the Pirates franchise holds the record for consecutive losing seasons and has for some time.

As discussed here, the NFL futility record (at least for the modern, Super Bowl era) is held by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, who went 14 years (1983-1996) without a winning season, whereas the NBA mark belongs to the Kansas City/Sacramento Kings franchise (15 years, 1983-84 through 1997-98). In the NHL, the Vancouver Canucks hold the record at 15 straight years of losing (1976-77 through 1990-91).*

Going back to the 2011 Pirates, it looked for a while this season that the team might finally end the streak. As this game article from the loss to St. Louis summarized: "...the Pirates were 51-44 and led the NL Central by a half-game before play on July 20. But they have gone 16-38 since, leaving them at 67-82."

In fact, as the August 1 trading deadline approached, the Pirates became "buyers" (teams within striking distance of the playoffs who trade for players who could put the team over the top) rather than "sellers" (teams that are hopelessly out of contention and trade their veterans to the buyers for young prospects) for the first time in a long while, acquiring veterans Derrek Lee and Ryan Ludwick.

Pittsburgh's trade-deadline moves obviously didn't have the desired effect, but at least they showed the team's fans (all three of them; just kidding) that management was willing to take some initiative when a winning season seemed within reach. Assuming the Pirates end the season with a win total in the low 70s, will they be able to win an extra 10 games or so next year to finally exceed the 81-81 break-even point? I'm skeptical.

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*Vancouver fans didn't exactly go through 15 years of suffering, however. Through the NHL's policy of letting a large percentage of its teams into the playoffs and the historically high upset rate once the postseason begins, the 1981-82 Canuck squad actually made the Stanley Cup finals. This, despite the team's regular-season ledger of 30 wins, 33 losses, and 17 ties.

Two record streaks in women's sports came to an end last night.

Penn State's women's volleyball team, which has won the last four NCAA national titles, had its 94-match home winning streak ended by Oregon, 3 games to 1. For the Ducks, who've long been in the shadow of Pac 10 (now 12) rivals Stanford, Cal, USC, UCLA, and Washington, this is quite a stunning win.

Meanwhile, out on the left coast, the Tulsa Shock of the WNBA snapped its 20-game losing streak by edging the Los Angeles Sparks 77-75. The veteran Sheryl Swoopes, whose illustrious career includes leading the Texas Tech Lady Raiders to the 1993 NCAA women's basketball title, winning three Olympic gold medals, and capturing four WNBA rings with the now-defunct Houston Comets, hit a buzzer beater for the win.

Jeremy Arkes and Jose Martinez have an article in the latest issue of the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports, purporting to show evidence for momentum in the National Basketball Association. Access to JQAS articles requires a subscription, but guest privileges to look at an individual article are available.

Using data from three recent seasons, the authors find "greater success in the past few games leads to a higher probability of winning the next game" (p. 13). Key to these results are statistical controls for focal teams' and opponents' long-term strength or ability levels (excluding the recent games), home/away status for a given team, and teams' number of days' rest between games. Some of the measures appear conceptually similar to an RPI ranking system, which accounts for teams' strength of schedule.

The study uses fairly complex econometric modeling and presents extensive results in tables. However, the authors distill the findings into easily graspable descriptions. For example, for each additional win a team has in its last 5 games, its probability of winning the next game goes up by roughly 2 to 4 percentage points.

I'm not sure, however, that these findings fit what the average fan would think of as "momentum." To some, momentum would suggest looking at teams that have won 5 in a row (or lost 5 in a row) and seeing how they do in their next game. Saying that a team with 1 win (vs. 0) or 5 wins (vs. 4) in its past 5 games has an increased probability of winning its next game (controlling for all of the aforementioned factors) is much more incremental in nature.

The Tulsa Shock of the Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA) has now lost 19 straight games, with Tuesday's defeat against the Minnesota Lynx being the latest. Tulsa's 18th consecutive setback, which came last Sunday, set the league record for longest losing streak. The Shock is now 1-24, with nine games left on its schedule.

Amidst the hubbub over allegations of improper benefits given to players by a booster at the University of Miami, Noel Nash of ESPN's Stats & Information Group has notified me of an unusual streak by former Hurricane football players at the pro level. For more than eight years now, a player who attended college at Miami "has scored a touchdown in every regular season week in the NFL... a span of 139 game weeks."

Dan Uggla's hitting streak ended at 33 games this afternoon, as his Atlanta Braves fell to the Chicago Cubs, 6-5. Much was made of Uggla's low batting average prior to the streak and how unlikely it seemingly made the streak. In my view, judging the likelihood of Uggla's hitting streak is not so simple.

Let's start with a refresher on some principles of probability. Batting average represents a player's probability of gettting a hit in any given official at-bat. Where consecutive-game hitting streaks are concerned, we're interested in the probability of a player getting at least one hit in a game. The latter will generally be a higher probability than the batting average because the player usually will have multiple official at-bats in a game.

To estimate the probability of a player getting at least one hit in a game, statisticians typically assume a number of official at-bats per game for the player and further assume independence of outcomes (i.e., that what happened on one at-bat has no effect on a later at-bat). As of the conclusion of yesterday's play, Uggla was getting 3.76 official at-bats (AB) per game (448/119). Looking at Baseball Reference's wonderful game-by-game log for Uggla this season, he had a few games (mostly prior to the streak) with 0 or 1 plate appearances, suggesting he appeared as either a late-inning defensive replacement or pinch hitter in a few games. Assuming regular starts, which would be the case well into a hitting streak, we could estimate he'd have 4 AB per game.

Whereas batting average (BA) is the probability of a success (hit) in a particular official at-bat, the probability of failure in that at-bat, F = (1 - BA). The probability of an all-failure (no hits) game with 4 AB is simply F raised to the 4th power. Getting at least one hit means avoiding an all-failure game, so the probability of getting at least one hit is: 1 - (F^4). To know F, we need to know BA, and that is where the difficulty arises with Uggla.

The day Uggla began his hitting streak (July 5), he woke up with a .173 BA. During the streak, he hit .377 (49/130). Upon completion of his last game during the streak (i.e., yesterday's), his season-to-date average sat at .232. And, while we're at it, his lifetime BA (excluding 2011) is .263. The question is, which batting average should we use to best capture his batting ability, let's say, midway through the hitting streak? Another way to think of the problem is that, Uggla's hitless game today notwithstanding, we wanted to know what BA to use for him in predicting his chances of getting a hit in his next 23 games, to tie Joe DiMaggio's record of 56 games.

The following table runs through the steps of transforming an Uggla batting average into his estimated probability of getting at least one hit in his next 23 games.


Even under the most advantageous assumption for Uggla -- namely taking his batting average exclusively from his recent streak -- the chances of tying DiMaggio would be only about two percent. Still, which batting average should we use?

As shown in the book Scorecasting by Moskowitz and Wertheim, a baseball player's batting average over the past two seasons is a better predictor of success in the next at-bat than is batting average over the last five plate appearances, last five games, the last month, or season-to-date. Thus, going by the principle that large sample size trumps recency, Uggla's lifetime batting average would appear to be the best of the above options in predicting his future hitting streaks.

Another factor that helped Uggla in putting together the 33-game hitting streak was his low walk rate. At the close of yesterday's play, he had only 39 bases on balls, so that his number of official AB (448) was not that much lower than his total plate appearances (494). A tendency to draw a lot of walks can really short-circuit a hitting streak because a player may only get 1 or 2 official AB per game, thus giving him few opportunities to get a hit (if a player walks in all of his plate appearances in a game, however, a hitting streak continues). As Joe D’Aniello wrote about in the Baseball Research Journal (Vol. 32, 2003) in conjunction with his examination of DiMaggio’s hitting streak, a key reason why Ted Williams never contended for a long hitting streak was his propensity to draw walks.

David Rockoff and Phil Yates, writing in the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports , identified as a flaw in statistical formulations of hitting streaks the assumption of the same number of at-bats per game (as I did above in making calculations based on 4 AB per game for Uggla). In real life, as noted above, a player may get only 1 or 2 AB in some games, thus harming his chances to extend a hitting streak. In Uggla's case, however, his rate of walks (and other plate appearances not resulting in official at-bats) is so low as to largely avoid the problem stated by Rockoff and Yates, in my view.

Dan Uggla's hitting streak is now at 30 games.

Here are some brief streakiness-related items, all from baseball.

*With today's win over Seattle, the Angels have now won 13 of their last 15 series (game-by-game log). The exceptions to the series wins are a 2-2 split at Detroit July 28-31; and the loss of 3-of-4 at Oakland July 15-17 (including a doubleheader).

*Today against the New York Mets, one member of the Atlanta Braves extended a hitting streak -- Dan Uggla, to 28 games -- whereas another, Freddie Freeman, saw his 20-game hitting streak end (article).

*A little over a week ago, two hitting streaks in the mid-20s ended: Emilio Bonifacio's (Marlins) at 26, and Dustin Pedroia's (Red Sox) at 25.

*Last Friday night, Milwaukee's Craig Counsell finally got a hit after 45 official at-bats without one. According to this article, "Some claimed Counsell tied the modern baseball record (since 1900) for a position player when he popped out to second base Monday against the St. Louis Cardinals. Others claimed the actual record was 0 for 46, set by Brooklyn catcher Bill Bergen in 1909."

*In getting swept by the Yankees in a four-game series (August 1-4), the Chicago White Sox didn't get a single walk offensively. It had been 43 years since the White Sox last went without a walk for four straight games. New York's pitchers may have had a hot hand when it came to throwing strikes, or maybe the Chicago batters just had impatient hands.

The Seattle Mariners have ended their losing streak at 17 games, with a 9-2 win today over the New York Yankees.

Frank Vaccaro, one of the streak experts in the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR), recently informed members what the longest baseball losing streaks of all time are. Restricting the list to 1900 and beyond, the longest losing streak was 23 by the Philadelphia Phillies in 1961. The 1988 Baltimore Orioles lost 21 straight, with the added twist that the losses were to start off the season (i.e., the O's had an 0-21 record at one point).

With their skid now concluded at 17 games, the 2011 Mariners officially have ended up tied for 23rd place in the all-time rankings for longest major-league baseball losing streaks (tied for 14th if one excludes teams from before 1900).

UPDATE: Jesse Wolfersberger at Fan Graphs estimates the probability of the Mariners' 17-game losing streak, using betting odds to derive the game-specific win probabilities. After the game-specific projections are converted to loss probabilities (1 - Win Prob), they are then multiplied together. A lot of commenters chime in on Wolfersberger's analysis, too.

The Seattle Mariners have now lost 14 games in a row, the longest losing streak this year in Major League Baseball. According to ESPN Stats & Information, the longest skid in the past 15 years is 19 games, by the 2005 Kansas City Royals. Before going on the 14-game losing streak, Seattle was actually a .500 team (43-43). However, the Mariners have lately been facing some of the better teams in the American League, such as the Angels, Rangers, and Red Sox (see game-by-game log). Seattle has one game remaining at Boston in the teams' current series, and then a three-game stand at Yankee Stadium, so an end to the losing streak may not be imminent!

With baseball's Texas Rangers on a winning streak that reached nine games last night (including shutouts in the last three contests), Gary Collard sent a message to the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) listserve discussion group, noting the weak opposition faced by Texas in recent weeks:

"The Rangers ended the pre-All Star break portion of their schedule by playing 16 of 19 games against last place teams. I think this is probably a record, since you would pretty much have to have two interleague series against your 'designated rival' to hope to match it (6 divisions is likely a must as well)."

The reference to a designated rival, in this case, describes the Rangers' six games against the Houston Astros (last place in the National League Central) on June 20-22 and 28-30, as a special geographic match-up during interleague play. Other last-place teams played by Texas include Florida (NL East, July 1-3), Baltimore (American League East; July 4-6), and Oakland (AL West, July 7-10). Also, the Seattle Mariners, against whom the Rangers have won the first two games of a current four-game series, are only slightly better than last in the AL West. The Rangers' last loss came in the finale of the Florida series.

Tom Ruane followed Collard's SABR message with one of his own. Because divisional play didn't begin until 1969 (prior to that, there only would have been two last place teams at a given time, one each in the AL and NL), Ruane used a different approach, focusing on opponents with poor records. One of Ruane's findings was that four times since 1900 has a team played 19 straight games against teams with winning percentages below .400. The most recent such team was the San Francisco Giants, who did so from May 21 to June 10, 2004, going 13-6.

My curiosity piqued, I decided to look up the Giants' streak myself. During the stretch, San Francisco played two games against the then-Montreal Expos (whose winning percentage was around .333 at the time); seven against the Arizona Diamondbacks (who peaked around .38 during these games); seven against the Colorado Rockies (who peaked around .39); and three against the Tampa Bay Rays (around .39).

Last January, I found a basketball analogue to the current Texas Rangers' situation, namely how a 19-out-of-20 winning stretch by the Miami Heat involved very few games against the NBA's best teams.

U.S. women's soccer goalie Hope Solo had her streak of 796 minutes without allowing a goal end today, in the Americans' 2-1 loss to Sweden in the women's World Cup (90 minutes is the regulation game length). The streak-ending goal came on a penalty kick, which is a special type of play that is especially difficult for the goalie to defend. However, Sweden scored again roughly 20 minutes later, so Solo's streak would have ended in the same game (albeit a little further along), even if we exclude penalty kicks.

Roger Federer hasn't been winning Grand Slam tournaments lately, but one way he appeared to be unassailable was when he won the first two sets (in a 3-out-of-5 format) in one of the Slam events (Wimbledon and the Australian, French, and U.S. Opens). Before today, in fact, he was 178-0 when ahead two sets to none in a Grand Slam event. That streak is now over, as Federer lost at Wimbledon to Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, 3-6, 6-7 (3), 6-4, 6-4, 6-4.

In winning its second straight NCAA College World Series baseball championship Tuesday night, the University of South Carolina established a number of streak-related records.

Since a 1999 expansion of the tournament to 64 teams, the format has consisted of four phases, each double-elimination. First, the 64 teams are divided into 16 regional sites of four teams each. The winning team in a regional will either have a 3-0, 3-1, or 4-1 record. The 16 regional winners are then paired off into eight super-regionals, each a 2-out-of-3 series. The eight super-regional winners then go to the College World Series, with preliminary rounds (again double-elimination) producing two finalists. The final championship series is again 2-out-of-3.

According to this article on the Gamecocks' 2011 title, South Carolina "became the first team to ever go 10-0 in an NCAA [baseball] tournament." The team went 3-0 in the regionals (beating Georgia Southern once and Stetson twice), then swept two from Connecticut in the super-regional. A 3-0 run through the World Series early rounds (beating Texas A&M once and Virginia twice) landed South Carolina in the final round, where it swept Florida, 2-0 (2011 game-by-game log).

Last year, South Carolina dropped its World Series opener, before rebounding for four straight wins to make the championship finals. The Gamecocks then swept UCLA, 2-0, to capture the title. Adding South Carolina's closing six victories in last year's World Series to this year's 10 straight wins in the overall postseason and five straight in the World Series yields some monster streaks.

As above-linked the article on South Carolina's 2011 championship notes, "The Gamecocks' streaks of 16 NCAA tournament wins and 11 straight in the CWS are both the longest all-time."

Talk about a fast start offensively to a baseball game! According to MLB.com:

In the top of the first inning Tuesday, the first eight Minnesota Twins hit safely, alternating singles and doubles. With those eight straight hits to begin the game, the Twins tied a Major League record accomplished six times before.

(Thanks to David Vincent, whose message to the Society for American Baseball Research [SABR] discussion group brought the Twins' streak to my attention.)

Rory McIlroy maintained his torrid pace all the way through the men's U.S. Open golf tournament, ultimately winning at 16-under-par (see Friday's posting, immediately below, for background). Second-place Jason Day, who finished 8 strokes behind McIlroy, went bogey-free (i.e., made par or better) on his final 45 holes.

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Baseball's Florida Marlins are now 1-18 for the month of June. Manager Edwin Rodriguez resigned before today's loss.

Northern Ireland's young Rory McIlroy tends to have a hot hand in the early rounds of the major men's pro golf tournaments, as I've graphed below (data source). However, he also sometimes goes erratic. He's done really well in his first two rounds of the U.S. Open, which is currently ongoing, achieving par or better on the first 35 holes he played, before double-bogeying the 36th (18th hole of Round 2). We'll see if he can retain his spectacular form on Saturday and Sunday to score his first victory in a major.