Matt’s latest book review got me thinking about hitting streaks, and - being a fan of the sport in Britain – my thoughts naturally turned to the subject of our domestic game.

The National League South schedule consists purely of 7-inning double-headers, and it seems fair enough to state that maintaining a hitting streak across such games would be harder than doing so with the full-length variety. (As a counterpoint, innings do tend to be a little longer in the British game, but this is probably more than cancelled out by the existence of the slaughter rule, which can see games terminated after as few as 4-and-a-half frames.)

As a way of addressing the question of how much harder it might be, I will firstly put together a very crude simulation of Joe DiMaggio’s career. Over 1736 games he amassed 2214 hits in 6821 at-bats. That’s a career batting average of .325, with 3.93 at-bats per game (we’ll call it 4 to keep things simple). Assuming that every game that DiMaggio plays in a fictitious 1736-game career he has 4 at-bats and a 32.5% chance of getting a hit each time (this is what I mean by crude), then the probability of him getting at least one hit in a game is a fraction under 80%. Using this, and with a bit of code in Excel, I can simulate his career as many times as I want. Even if this doesn’t sound like fun, you might still be interested in the results. Continue reading →