...which isn't to say that what he's doing isn't pretty darn cool.
Just in case you have no idea who Nolan Arenado is, he's the third baseman for the Colorado Rockies of the National League, and he's currently enjoying a 28-game hitting streak. The record, set by the legendary Joe DiMaggio in 1941, is 56 games, and it considered by many to be the most unbreakable record in all of sports. By the simplest measure, Arenado is half of the way there.
Nolan Arenado's BA last year was .267.
The odds of a .267 hitter getting at least one hit in a single game are
70.7%, assuming an average of 3.94 at-bats (Arenado's average for the
season). The odds of this 28-game hitting streak are that number to the
28th power, which comes out to about .0061%, or a one in 16,408 chance.
The odds of a 56 game hitting streak are that 70.7% to the 56th power,
which gives you a .00000037% or one in 269,238,850 chance. Baseball
plays a whole lot of games, so one stretch of 28 games for every 16,408
such stretches is not an unimaginable event. One stretch of 56 games in
the next two- to three-hundred million stretches of 56 games means that
a player like Nolan Arenado is going to have a 56 game hitting streak
about the same time that humans are extinct and dinosaurs rule the earth
again.
If you take Arenado's streak-influenced career batting average of .280,
which one might or might not argue is more reflective of his true
abilities, this current streak looks like a more likely event. Assuming
a .280 hitter, this streak had a .013% or one in 7624 chance of
occurring. The odds of a 56 game hitting streak would be .00000172% or
one in 58,119,593. That's closer by almost one order of magnitude, but
still ridiculously unlikely.
Arenado's batting average this season is .324. If that's reflective of
his true abilities (which seems pretty unlikely, as Hall-of-Famer DiMaggio's career batting average was .325 in an era when more players were over .300), then the odds of him
having a 56-game hitting streak are .000144% or one in 692,712. That
still won't happen in this lifetime. This current streak, on the other
hand, would have had a .12% or one in 832 chance of happening, which
actually starts to look pretty likely.
That's why you see a hitter have a streak of 20-30 games every few years, why Arenado is not really halfway to matching DiMaggio's famous streak, and
why Joe DiMaggio's record won't fall unless baseball is played for the
next several thousand years.
(Credits: BaseballReference.com statistics for Nolan Arenado, Google
calculator, and the Society Heading Egregiously Ridiculous Baseball
Research Today [SHERBRT])
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