Tuesday, May 02, 2006 |
The Brutal Reality Of Sample Sizes: A's 10, Angels 3
What I wanted to harp on, though, was something that intrigued me when I first skimmed it in Baseball Hacks, and that is that the bare minimum number of at bats required to establish a player's true level of ability is 250. Two hundred and fifty! And that's just to get a peek with a ±10% error band, and a mere 80% of the time. Looking at the team stats page for the Angels, it's evident that we'll need to get to the end of May before we're even close to the right number of at bats. Assuming the same 250 at bats works, if converted to batters faced, on the pitching side, it would appear that we need another month; even the most advanced pitcher, Lackey, has only faced 155 batters. So we have a ways to go. Small sample sizes are a lot higher than you might think; as often as I'm tempted to (and actually do) panic, the reality is a lot different.
: 5/02/2006 11:30:00 PM
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