I’m in the course of looking at some splits for active players (mostly day/night splits) and came across something I found interesting.
The link is Josh Hamilton’s statistics during day games by year. (All numbers in this post come from b-r.) The thing I keyed in on is tOPS+, which is his OPS relative to his overall OPS–100 would be equal, and 120, say, would be a 20% increase. Here’s that number in day games over his career, with the number of day plate appearances in parentheses:
36 (85), 73 (172), 108 (96), 59 (145), 49 (143), 112 (169), 101 (182).
Now, that’s a pretty dramatic uptick in the last two years, but this is a player known for his volatility (in more than one sense), and we’re not looking at huge samples. Is there a simple explanation? At first, it seems so:
Rangers outfielder Josh Hamilton walked into the clubhouse wearing contact lenses that made his eye look red on Friday. His hope is that they can cut down in the amount of light and help him see the ball better during the day.
That quote is from ESPN Dallas, dated June 24, 2011.
Is this evidence that those stats aren’t a fluke, or (alternatively) evidence that the red contacts aren’t total quackery?
Of course, it’s not simple. For one, there’s no information I could find suggesting that he actually kept wearing them.* Moreover, some of that difference probably is just randomness, since his BABIP was 100 points higher in night games that year. Relatedly, his SLG was about 300 points higher as well–which is a sign he was making much better contact, though it could just be luck. (I couldn’t find his Line Drive % split by Day/Night, but a higher LD% would account for both SLG and BABIP.) Perhaps most importantly, Hamilton actually played about half his 2011 day games after he got the lenses, and still wound up with that awful split.
Still, the fact remains that his (relative) performance went from really awful to respectable after this. The most obvious reason it evened out, though, is that his nighttime strikeout rate almost doubled (2011: 13.4%, 2012: 25.5%, 2013: 24.2%), while his daytime strikeout rate stayed the same (2011: 28.0%, 2012: 25.4%, 2013: 26.4%).
If you’re a believer in the contacts, you’d say that he’s gotten worse overall, but that overall backsliding was counteracted by his daytime improvement, so his splits normalized. If you’re skeptical, especially since he probably hasn’t been wearing the contacts, you say that there was a lot of luck in that 2011 split and that this is regression to the mean. I’m inclined to go with the latter, not least because it’s much simpler.
However, I’m on the fence as to whether Hamilton actually is a worse hitter during day games. On the one hand, he’s got a season and a half of data and the second worst split among active players with at least 600 day at-bats. On the other hand, there’s a 40 point differential in BABIP that I’m fairly willing to chalk up to luck, and there are major multiplicity concerns when you pull one split for one player out of the vast morass of baseball data. I’m inclined to file this whole thing away as an example of the difficulties of trying to do rigorous data work: sometimes you see an interesting nugget in the data and think you have a great explanation, and then it evaporates when you do a bit more digging. C’est la vie.
*This is a big deal, and probably enough to nullify any conclusions I could draw. I kept going just for the hell of it.
That's a Clown Hypothesis, Bro! 