[Quick Hit] Will Someone Hit .400 this Year?

by Posted on

Probably not.

There is chatter about how this year’s stats are going to look crazy when taken out of context due to the shortened season. While this is true, I think the size of the effect people claim is overstated. I have heard more than once that this year somebody is going to hit over .400. I think it is likely that someone will hit .350 or .360, but .400 is quite unlikely.

To show this, I simulated 1000 shortened seasons where a guy who hits .320 takes 270 at bats over 60 games. What I did was in each at-bat assume he gets a hit with probability 32% then simulated all these at-bats and computed what his season average was.

In the plot below, between the red lines accounts for the middle 95% of seasons. Between the green lines the middle 99% of seasons. Essentially you should think that a true .320 hitter has a 95% chance to have his season long average fall between the red lines. So, there is less than a 1% chance that a .320 hitter will break .400 for the season.

In a shortened season, it is still not likely someone will hit .400

Almost everything suggests the career .320 hitter is going to bat between .250 and .390 for the shortened season. Compare this to same experiment for a 162 game season.

Now, the guy is almost guaranteed to be between, say, .280 and .360 for the full length season. Notice that the shortened season allows for a much wider range of outcomes, but batting .400 is still quite a ways off. Look for a full length article discussing this in more detail in the next few days.

Published by jdashbrock

2 Replies to “[Quick Hit] Will Someone Hit .400 this Year?”

  1. Does shortened season magnify hitting streaks..both good and bad ? The short season would also limit the number of hitting streaks opportunities..hard to recover from the bad or easier to ride the good?

    1. You can expect fewer notable hitting streaks this season. This is simply because there aren’t as many chances for a player to rattle off 10 straight hits, for instance. You can think of hitting streaks as ‘unlikely events’ or ‘1%’ events. As the season goes on longer and longer, there are many more opportunities and so the 1% events become more and more likely. Great Question!

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