Tuesday, 08/13/02

Lisa Belkin's cover story for the NYT Magazine about coincidence and human pattern-finding tendencies in a troubling time is wonderful for many reasons, not least this snippet:

Among other things, Tversky disproved the "hot hand" theory of basketball, the belief that a player who has made his last few baskets will more likely than not make his next. After examining thousands of shots by the Philadelphia 76ers, he proved that the odds of a successful shot cannot be predicted by the shots that came before.

I've never heard of Tversky or this finding before, but I've been fascinated for years by the statistical apparatus of Major League Baseball. The depth of information they collect and the speed and ease with which the most off-the-wall announcers' musings can be backed up by hard numbers never ceases to amaze.

(I watched a game early this season where Ichiro was toying with a pitcher, fouling off ball after ball after ball with two strikes, waiting for something he could hit, when sometime after the fourteenth pitch one of the announcers wondered out loud how often Ichiro connects with the ball. This can't be calculated from hits/walks/strikeouts/hit-by-pitch, because you can swing any number of times and hit foul balls before striking out, or not swing at all and get called strikes. Less than three minutes later the announcer had his statistic, some hard number in excess of 92%, tallying the number of times Ichiro had swung the bat and connected in his debut season in major league baseball. That's the mark of a well-designed data model.)

A couple of months ago I was wondering aloud to my pal Ted about what could be called the hot hand theory of baseball. Every time a batter steps up, you're going to see and hear that player's performance in the game to date. Does it mean anything?

It's not as cold a calculation as basketball, because I think there really are pitcher-batter relationships in which one of them just has the other's number, and I would expect that in the large, one will find better batter performance the second and third times through the lineup batting against the same starting pitcher within a game. But I've always wondered just how good a predictor one's intra-game performance really is. Someday I'm going to have to find out. 11:23AM «

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