He wants to bet on Voros' Law?

False dichotomy between "Us" & "Them".

Again, is there anyone but an analyst or saber person who does NOT believe in players being hot or cold?

You can easily make a case that the answer is "yes". Some managers manage by playing people who are "hot" over people who are "cold", but there are a lot of others who play the best players, no matter what they did over the last week or two. I suppose that playing someone who is cold doesn't mean you don't believe in the concept, but is an indication that they don't put as much weight into it as you'd might think.

This issue is a lot like clutch hitting. The fact that "cold" and "hot" don't apply to most players or most situations doesn't mean it never applies. It might be misused by the MSM, but it doesn't mean it never exists.

That should be easy enough for all those pundits who think they can tell when someone is “pressing” or “seeing the ball well” or “locked in” or whatever you want to call it.

I see posters here talk about pressing.

Example:

16. Smiling Joe Hesketh Posted: October 18, 2007 at 09:23 AM (#2582216)

I wish some of Manny's attitude would rub off on Pedroia, who's having a horrible postseason, is pressing badly, and generally looking like a nervous, overmatched rookie. If Pedroia could calm himself a bit it would only help him.

Why not just tell people to mute the commentators?

Why not just tell people to mute the commentators?

Because then we wouldn't know who sponsored the last stolen base.

It's too bad Jim Edmonds isn't still with the Cards and never gets his hot streaks any more... I've never seen anyone quite like him in terms of hot/cold. Anyone care to figure out the odds of a career .287/.379/.531 hitter (now, I don't know what he was in '04: finished the season .301/.418/.643) going 162 AB's hitting .370/.502/.876 with 23 bombs in July/August '04? ISO of .506 vs. season-.225/career-.152. It's gonna be a struggle to convince me he wasn't in a different mental (/physical?) state of some sort during that stretch.

The really interesting thing would be to get PLAYERS to tell when they think they are hot and cold. Hell that'd be a self-fulfilling prophecy anyway probably as confidence is a big part of all of that I'd imagine.

This issue is a lot like clutch hitting. The fact that "cold" and "hot" don't apply to most players or most situations doesn't mean it never applies. It might be misused by the MSM, but it doesn't mean it never exists.

Right, but then the question becomes can those situations be identified ahead of time in order to react to them. I'm pretty sure no one disagrees that the pressure got to Rick Ankiel back when he was a pitcher. The question is whether that was foreseeable before it happened.

There's a difference between arguing that there are hot and cold streaks and that certain individuals are able to identify them either retro or proactively. Hitter performance arises from a lot of inputs and I think it would be silly to believe that a manager could never know that a hitter's input is suboptimal (e.g. has a wrist injury, is pulling his head out, etc.) Whther you can predict the performance moving forward I'd say it would be folly to keep trotting a suboptimal hitter out there if there are better options available, particularly if the coldness isnt correctable by playing through it.

I would agree that annoucners/media are in a poor position to identify these things with any reasonable authority or accuracy.

I'm not convinced that there are hot and cold streaks but, if I were a manager, I would definitely give a guy more playing time if he were perceived as being on a hot streak. I would do that because I would want to create a certain attitude on my club, an attitude whereby the players believe that if they improve their performance, they get more playing time. That said, if I had a player who I thought, based on his history and ability, could perform, I wouldn't necessarily cut the playing time of a player who was on a cold streak. If he was one of my better players, I would keep on sending him out there in the hope that his luck would soon turn. It would get a bit dicer if the player on the cold streak were marginal anyway. Then I would have to decide if someone else could do a better job.

To me there is a very strong correlation between 'hot and cold' and 'healthy and not healthy but still playing'. So in that sense, hot and cold streaks are very real.

In my own personal experience, I have always felt feeling "hot" and "cold" is a matter of having your mechanics really clicking. Swinging a bat correctly takes a lot of little things all firing correctly, muscle memory, etc. Mechanically, when your swing is good it simply "feels" right.

Now, I have also felt that mechanics click in a totally statistically sound manner, i.e. if your mechanics are more often correct (Pujols) your entire baseline performance increases and the time you spend above and below that line simply look like random variance. Same thing holds true for a jump shot or throwing a pass. Does hot and cold exist? I've felt it does, but it isnt predictable and it looks just like random noise when looking at statistics.

In my own personal experience, I have always felt feeling "hot" and "cold" is a matter of having your mechanics really clicking. Swinging a bat correctly takes a lot of little things all firing correctly, muscle memory, etc. Mechanically, when your swing is good it simply "feels" right.

I'm unfairly singling you out, but let's just take apart the phrasing here:

"In my own personal experience": Ah, the language of unverifiability.
"I have always felt feeling 'hot' and 'cold'": Doubly subjective construction, referring the feeling of hot and cold to a "feeling" or opinion of what it means. Again, no hard evidence.
"having your mechanics really clicking": mechanics, a technical sounding term, but not really a technical concept. And, "really clicking" refers back to "mechanics," to continue the metaphor.
"Swinging a bat correctly takes a lot of little things all firing correctly": My guess is that part of the "things firing correctly" is the randomness of the pitcher's "mechanics" being aligned with yours in such a way that he throws the ball in a place where your bat can hit it.
"Muscle memory": There is no such thing.

The human body is a machine, but one with highly variable performance. I would be willing to bet that it "feels" right when you're having success, and doesn't when you're not, suggesting that it's more like psychological conditioning.

Does hot and cold exist? I've felt it does, but it isnt predictable and it looks just like random noise when looking at statistics.

But if it exists, how can it look like random noise? I could be completely off base, I'm no statistician, but if the data is distributed as if the event was random, then don't you conclude that it was random? I'm not saying that there aren't other factors which can interfere, but the event itself is random. If the event itself isn't random, then the variance won't look random when you run the numbers.

If Pujols has a baseline, but also hot and cold streaks that aren't just random, then the distribution will look different. Specifically, there will be times when he's on a cold streak (due to his streakiness) AND he has bad luck with BABIP (or other factors). Then his performance will be more negative then you'd predict and it wouldn't look like random noise.

But if it exists, how can it look like random noise? I could be completely off base, I'm no statistician, but if the data is distributed as if the event was random, then don't you conclude that it was random? I'm not saying that there aren't other factors which can interfere, but the event itself is random. If the event itself isn't random, then the variance won't look random when you run the numbers.

It depends on how powerful the effect. A normal distribution tells you that streaks are not a common part of baseball, and what appears to be a hot or cold streak is usually just random variation. However, a normal distribution does not tell you whether true hot and cold streaks are rare or non-existent.

The hot and cold discussion reminds me of talk of ghosts, UFOs, or miracles. If someone swears they have seen one, there is nothing you can show them, no lack of evidence, no logic to sway their opinion.

If an athlete says he is feeling "locked in", or "hot", or "on fire" there is really nothing you can do or say to make them think they are wrong... and of course, when an athlese believes in this, sportswriters believe in it.

Jason Varitek is the backup catcher on my DMB team. The other day he went 3-4 with a double and a home run, so I played him again the next day.

"Muscle memory is a common term for neuromuscular facilitation, which is the process of the neuromuscular system memorizing motor skills." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muscle_memory)

There has to be room somewhere in this conversation for the issue of hitting mechanics. There are any number of learned behaviors that make batter outcomes better. Some are mental: going the other way on a fastball over the outer half of the plate, laying off the curveball in the dirt, being more selective early in the count, etc. Some are physical: stroke gets too long, bat going through the strike zone at a bad angle, etc. It's not irrational to think that the learning process for these skills, some of which involve muscle memory, is imperfect and that players will sometimes forget and temporarily lapse into bad habits, resulting in worse outcomes.

To me this implies that cold streaks are likely to be real, as every player will go through a period where he gets into a bad habit or two. I haven't seen an article or study that addresses the question this way, but my intuition says that if someone approached the problem in the right way, they would find some evidence that cold streaks exist. How strong the effect would be, I wouldn't know without seeing the research.

It doesn't follow, of course, that "hot streaks" are real, of course. I would suspect that the distribution of performance around the mean is not normal, but is skewed toward the left more like a Poisson distribution (http://www.palgrave-journals.com/jors/journal/v57/n8/images/2602062f1.jpg), where the region left of the mean is "hot" and right of the mean is "cold". That's just a guess though, and I don't know what exactly the research has shown on this topic.

I feel a bit about it as noted in post #12 and #18.

For an example, in the league playoffs for straight pool this year, in the first two rounds, I was destroying, locked in, and dead-on. Runs of 19, 22, and my personal high, 26 balls. But in the third round, I got totally snakebit. The entire match I was completely locked up, couldn't make a straight shot, couldn't do ANYTHING. I was cold as ice and got destroyed. I'm a good player, but my mechanics abandoned me. I'm not entirely sure how to describe it. I think it's nerves, and I think baseball players get them too, and miss that dead fastball they are normally destroying.

I have an easier time believing hot and cold players than I do CLUTCH.

I'm no statistician, but if the data is distributed as if the event was random, then don't you conclude that it was random?

No, you can't. You can NEVER conclude that an event IS random. There may be some other cause of the event that your measurement isn't sensitive enough to identify; there may be a cross-correlated event for which you are not controlling (say, health) that affects the measurement; there can be any number of reasons why you didn't pick up the effect, of which "the effect doesn't exist" is only one.

-- MWE

You can NEVER conclude that an event IS random.

You need to include the qualifier "with absolute certainty" here. Most people don't live in that world.

#18--so if cold streaks are real, and hitting mechanics are damn complicated, then, given all the different "bad habits" you can fall into, "cold" could simply name the normal state of affairs; and "hot", then, is what you look like when you're temporarily not doing any of the many possible things wrong.....

These are all reasons why performance during a given period of time can vary from an established norm, and I suppose you're right that one could perceive a period when mechanics and approach are lined up as a "hot streak". However, in theory each player has a ceiling to his performance just based on physical tools that limits how "hot" he can be, and I guess I have this idea that major league hitters would regularly operate much closer to that ceiling, because they would already have to be doing so many things right to be able to hit well enough to make the majors. That means it would be a lot easier, and more common, for their performance to decline from that established level than to improve. So they would be more likely to go through an extended cold streaks than a hot streak. But I have no idea if the data backs this up.