MGL is in the zone…with a challenge.
I would also love (since this is the thing that commentators talk about - incessantly - most during game broadcasts, and this is the thing that people claim they can “see”) to see something done with hot and cold players. The only way I can think of to do that would be to have a website where any participant can log in, input their “user id” and classify someone as hot or cold until further notice. 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. Again, is there anyone but an analyst or saber person who does NOT believe in players being hot or cold?
Here is the kicker. I am willing to donate a substantial sum of money to a charity chosen by one side of the debate - the “non-sabermetric” side of course, if they win. We would have to define “winning” - maybe best of 3, if we do 3 things, like clutch, batter/pitchers, and hot/cold. Or we can do each one separately.
If the sabermetric side wins, I will also donate money, but that will be to a charity of our choice and it will be less money.
I’m not sure how much, but it would be on the order of $10,000 for them and $5,000 for us. What the heck. Anything to make a point. If this flies, let none of my/our detractors/naysayers EVER say that I won’t put my money where my mouth is! This should generate some good publicity and might encourage the media and perhaps some insiders to participate.
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1. Chris Dial Posted: January 24, 2008 at 03:42 PM (#2675315)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.
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.
Because then we wouldn't know who sponsored the last stolen base.
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.
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.
I would agree that annoucners/media are in a poor position to identify these things with any reasonable authority or accuracy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 need to include the qualifier "with absolute certainty" here. Most people don't live in that world.
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