Week 5, How Long Do Hot and Cold Streaks Last?

 

Arthur and his family took in a beautiful Easter while he enjoyed telling stories of holding the longest hot streak in Floored history, almost certainly

Dave continued his surge up the ranks this week with a strong showing. He won net wins by 13 over Paul. Meanwhile Max’s race to the bottom has been won with him not reaching 30 innings pitched for back to back weeks. He has been put on notice that missing 30 IP this week will make me hold him to 0s for pitching for one rotation around the league to keep it fair to everyone. Dean made the other big jump this week going from 9^th to 5^th….just in time to play Michael this week.

Wide variance in EWW this week but its not even Max at the very bottom. His pitching ratios were doing well this week but coming up 7 innings short cost him 2 categories. Kevin’s luck turned around posting a full 3 Wins Over Expected to offset the rough start to the  year he’d had, opponents-wise. Meanwhile Michael had a rough Sunday against Robert with Robert snagging 3 full toss-up categories that day and making Michael’s WOE go negative. Michael still has nothing to complain about compared to Arthur’s -3.44, a top-5 unlucky number for the year.

I was thinking last week about hot and cold streaks. Arthur and I had gotten off to an unexpected hot streak to start the year, which then quickly turned cold out of nowhere. We’ve all felt this before, but I wanted some perspective. The ‘why?’ seemed like a question beyond my paygrade, but I could calculate the ‘how long?’ So I did. I went back to 2019, which was when had our biggest rule change to adjust statistical categories (not counting increased rosters to 30 without changing anything other than wins to net wins). I came up with basic criteria for what makes a team hot or cold using weekly EWW totals as the metric to check. If a team had a 3 week combined EWW of over 25, I called that a hot stretch, if they were below 18 for 3 weeks, that is a cold stretch. An EWW of 7 should be expected. What the data shows is that hot and cold stretches seem to be more about the manager than anything else:

Numbers of Hot and Cold streaks of at least 4 weeks since 2019

 

OK some details. Yes, that Max cold streak number is real. Max, in 2022, well he just didn’t have it, it actually carried over in 2023. He was cold for 21 weeks straight, these were the days when Max was falling off the Power Ranks chart, but he showed us what was up in 2024.

Remember that I’ve chosen to sum 3-week numbers, so it takes 3 weeks to find a hot or cold team, and then I’ve limited this chart to more than 4 weeks of hot or cold, but you can see the team by team variability of streaks. Michael, Arthur, and Robert break out of their cold streaks quickly, as did Brian/Josh. Dave, Dean, and Paul also similarly get through them quickly. Max, Cory, and Keith seem to have had a harder time breaking out of cold streaks.

On the positive side, Michael and Arthur have shown the ability to get hot and stay hot. Dave is in a category of his own, seemingly that when he gets hot, it’s going to last exactly 5 weeks, no more. Cory, Dean and Paul have had some variability to their good runs. Max, Robert, and Keith are looking to figure how to get hot and stay that way. Kevin hasn’t built up enough data to have much to look at yet, so I kept him off the chart, but I kept Brian and Josh’s numbers here so that you could see how they did. I have full faith that Kevin’s hot streak data will put us all to shame in no time

Note that the longest hot streak belonged to Arthur, even though Michael had more 10-week hot stretches over the last 5 years. That same 2022 when Max was struggling, Arthur was rolling to a 12-week hot stretch.