Comments on: The Great Regression: The Offense http://wrigleyville.locals.baseballprospectus.com/2016/05/25/the-great-regression-the-offense/ Just another Baseball Prospectus Local Sites site Sat, 16 Feb 2019 21:04:52 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1.1 By: victor19nyc http://wrigleyville.locals.baseballprospectus.com/2016/05/25/the-great-regression-the-offense/#comment-10771 Thu, 26 May 2016 17:31:00 +0000 http://wrigleyville.locals.baseballprospectus.com/?p=11286#comment-10771 I was thinking the same thing as Alf. Fowler’s “regression” may just be that he performs at his “average” for the rest of the season, so given his hot start he will exceed his pre-season projection over the course of this set of 162 games. I think we’re just hoping Heyward will bat 0.750 OPS the rest of the way, forget about actually streaking long enough to meet his full season projection.

As for Rizzo, he’s become an enigma. If you chart his performance on a sine wave he’s up, then way down, then way up, then way down again. Not a model of consistency.

]]> By: Carlos Portocarrero http://wrigleyville.locals.baseballprospectus.com/2016/05/25/the-great-regression-the-offense/#comment-10729 Wed, 25 May 2016 15:22:58 +0000 http://wrigleyville.locals.baseballprospectus.com/?p=11286#comment-10729 You are right Alf, it’s technically not a regression. But thank you for the compliment on the pun: that was the reason I used that title. This was more of an fun exercise of looking at numbers and how fans let themselves get too high or too low based on a trickle of data.

That being said, I appreciate the correction! Our readers will come away even better informed than they were before your comment.

]]> By: alf http://wrigleyville.locals.baseballprospectus.com/2016/05/25/the-great-regression-the-offense/#comment-10727 Wed, 25 May 2016 14:02:56 +0000 http://wrigleyville.locals.baseballprospectus.com/?p=11286#comment-10727 This isn’t how regression works. The expectation is that a player will hit at his projection (or career norm) the rest of the way, not hit so that the overall results match the projection. Those games are already played, and unless the games changed your projections, you should have the same expectations for future performance as you did at the beginning of the season.

This is known as the gambler’s fallacy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler%27s_fallacy

If you just want to mess around with numbers, that’s fine, but don’t call it regression (despite the decent pun), and don’t say that should temper pessimism, or affect expectations in any way. There’s not really any meaning to these numbers at all.

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