[Peter_Spaeth]

Originally Posted by G1911

I don't know how to effectively test this with Baseball Reference where I can look up individual players etc., but I would guess that most guys that hit .270 have a stretch where they hit .556 for four games (or substitute average for whatever high achieving stat we like; while average is not the best stat overall I think it does a very very good job of tracking short term 'hotness'). They'll probably also have a stretch at .111. More than one, really. I would expect if we took, say, a thousand players and tested this, cutting up blocks of four games, the results would indicate it would be more surprising if Pujols did NOT have a stretch like this. I would be interested to know beyond hypothesizing.

I didn't watch those games, or the highlights. Maybe he got grooved one, there's a long history of that (McLain I think it was, lobbing a gift to Mickey for #500 as I recall) too, but I don't think there's a data problem here, even if that is what happened.

It's not that he had a stretch like this that bothers me, it's that he just so happened to have it when he did, in the final games of his career and trying to catch Ruth. The odds ex ante before the first of the four games that he would get 9 RBI over the next four games and pass Ruth must beenormous I would think. I'm not smart enough to be sure, but I think your analysis is missing the context.