Hitting Streaks Don't Obey Your Rules: Evidence That Hitting Streaks Aren't Just By-Products of Random Variations

There have been more hitting streaks in Major League Baseball than we would expect. All batting lines of MLB hitters from 1957-2006 were randomly permuted 10,000 times and the number of hitting streaks of each length from 2 to 100 was measured. The average count of each length streak was then compared to the corresponding total from real-life, when the games were in chronological order. The number of streaks in real-life was significantly higher than over the random permutations. Non-starts (such as pinch-hitting appearances) were removed since these may be unduly reducing the number of streaks in the permutations; the number of streaks in the permutations increased but was still significantly lower than real-life totals. Possible explanations are given for why more streaks have appeared in real-life than we would expect, including possibly the hot hand idea. Contact at trentm@email.unc.edu