I remember a somewhat heated discussion about this back a year or two.
There is a split between those who experience baseball as a player and those who are experts in statistics.
Statisticians will tell you that hot and cold streaks are mostly optical illusions. The player does not get better or worse during the streak; rather, random events naturally produce streaks.
In other words, if you repeatedly flip a coin five times in a row, there is one chance in sixteen that you will get all heads. There is also a chance in sixteen that you will get all tails. However, the important thing is that these are just random events, and regardless of those five coin flips, there remains a 50-50 chance that the sixth coin toss will produce a heads or a tails. A streak of five does not mean that the coin is hot or cold in the sense that it is now more or less likely to come up heads.
Baseball players will tell you that this is not the case with streaks in baseball. During a hot or cold streak, the ball looks different, the confidence feels different... so after hitting .500 for a week or after hitting.050 for a week, the player really is more (or less) likely than usual to get a hit next time he comes to bat.
Statisticians (Stephen Jay Gould wrote a great piece on this) answer that this is nonsense. When you analyze baseball statistics, you find that streaks are no more common or long than random events should produce.
I don't know who is right about baseball, but I do recall that there was heart-felt discussion in these forums about which way a baseball sim should operate. At the time, it was made clear that OOTP (2?) was unusual in that it modelled streaks as "real." A .280 hitter who got hot really did have better than a 28% chance of getting a hit in his next at bat. How much better? For how long? Under what circumstances does this kick in? Is this accurately labeled by the "hot" and "cold" streaks on our screen? Is this the same for each player, or is it an individual trait? Is this what is meant by the consistency rating? All interesting questions, to me at least, but I don't have the answers.
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