Giancarlo Stanton is heating up baseball right now with his six straight games with a home run and a career-high 44* home runs this year while it's still the middle of August and there's September left to do more damage. Since he is doing so well in that department, let's take a look at how often we can expect him to hit a home run in every at-bat he takes. The best way to find this is to calculate confidence intervals that will show how less likely and how most likely he is to hit a home run. Confidence Intervals and How They Work: Confidence Intervals try to estimate an athlete's ability to do a certain activity but they are not the end-all. The formula I used (yes, there are multiple for multiple occasions) works with single proportions, like home runs. These will predict a 95% chance of being correct and involve his observed proportion of success (44 HRs in 439 AB) add/subtracted by 2 (the multiplier used with an approximately normal distribution) that is multiplied by the square root of the performance (.100, or 44/439) multiplied by his performance subtracted by 1, over the number of attempts (439 again!!!). It sounds confusing in words, but it looks doable in number form. Thankfully, I can just show you the numbers and what his confidence intervals are. Confidence Intervals for 2017: We are 95% confident that the interval of plausible values from .072 to .128 contain Stanton's ability to hit a home run this season. Now, let's compare this to another season of this, because the best person to compare him to is himself and not anyone else. I chose 2014 because he hit 37 that year, his previous career-high. 37 is a great total by itself, but what he is doing this year makes that look mediocre now once you see the difference below. Confidence Intervals for 2014: We are 95% confident that the interval of plausible values from .046 to .09 contain Stanton's ability to hit a home run in 2014. Conclusion: Stanton is amazing and should not stop hitting balls out of the park because we love it. Seriously, it would be great to see this again once the season is over and if it changed by a lot or only a little. Note: These stats were taken on Friday morning before his game vs. the Mets last night.
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AuthorHi, I'm Jenna and I'm a sports fan! I've been avidly watching sports since 2011 because I found that by watching sports, I would be able to communicate with my dad and brother better. Ever since I got into sports, I've been able to enjoy myself more when I go to sporting events with my family. Archives
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