Finish Strong, Start Strong?

Despite that fact that he was remarkably consistent for the entire 2010 season, Jose Bautista's performance last year was generally regarded with suspicion and as somewhat flukey. Fans reminisced of forgotten fluke seasons,  like the 50 homer campaigns of Brady Anderson and Luis Gonzalez, and wondered where Bautista's power surge was coming from. Both Bautista, and Jays hitting instructors, credited a change in his hitting approach that he made the previous September as the difference maker - a month in which Bautista clubbed 9 HRs.


We know that baseball is a game of "adjustments" and that batters and pitchers are constantly looking for that final tweak to vault themselves into the games elite and big money contracts. So just how relevant are those month long tears, second half surges, and other improbable hot streaks to predicting future success? Not very relevant at all as it turns out and thankfully I didn't have to search too hard (or do the research myself) to discover someone who answered similar questions.

Prior to last season, Tristan Cockroft at ESPN ran the numbers from the past six years to see if there were any correlations between second half surges and future performance. His discovery? With the exception of players under the age of 23 - who should generally be expected to perform better - there is no reason to expect an excellent second half to translate to future success. In fact, over 60 percent of players performed worse than their career averages (not just their hot streak) in the following season, which means foreseeing improved performance has worse odds than a coin-flip.

So what do we learn from Bautista? Nothing. Except that while advanced statistics give us some measure of predictability, baseball still remains a game of anomalies and that is part of the reason why we love it so much. So who is this years Bautista? A journeyman player who has bounced around and swatted 13 homers last year? How about Wilson Betemit?