Quote:
Originally Posted by Brad K
We already have players who perform way above or way below what's plausible. I think it's not workable for the game to create streaks on top of that. Additionally any data on a player's real life streakiness is going to be an insufficient sample size.
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I’ve posted data elsewhere that confirms that players actually are more streaky in real life than random chance would suggest. As for your example… well, we hate attributing luck to real life events but at approximately the same time that Tony Armas, a rated .230 guy in the first place, was hitting .180 for you in your OOTP universe, Gorman Thomas hit .155 over 160 at bats before being shut down, then went on to have a couple more good seasons with non-.155 averages before ending his career with another really awful hitting slump. Reggie Jackson also had a season in the early 80s where he couldn’t break the Mendoza Line and then proceeded to hit .234 - not great but not under .200 either - over the last 4 years of his career.
Batting average has a relatively large amount of spread, or at least the margin between what we consider a good hitter and a bad one are very small. IIRC the standard deviation for straight up BA is 30 points, which means that if you were to run 100 Tony Armas 1982-83 seasons, you should expect him to hit below .200 in around 17 of them and under .165 in around 5. The year you’re posting is a small outlier but frankly not huge.