BATTERS: July-August HctX Leaders

As shorter-term fantasy baseball proliferates, many owners take a little more interested look at the immediate short-term performance of players to see if they can find batters who are “riding the hot hand” or “swinging the hot stick,” or other temperature-related clichés.

In this thinking, they are amply reinforced by the geniuses in baseball’s various broadcast booths, who breathlessly report that such-and-such a hitter “is batting .346 (or three HR or eight RBI) in his last six games.”

The problem is that scant evidence supports the idea that very short-run success has any predictive value for the next short-run period. Indeed, it can—and has—been argued that even a full season is only modestly useful in predicting the next full...

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