When does the hot hand cease to be hot?
Here's a graph of Ryan Theriot's OPS over the past 18 days. (Why 18? Because that's when I got tired of figuring out OPSes.)
I've heard no small amount of people suggest that we continue to play Theriot while he's "hot" or "playing well," in favor of Ronny Cedeno, who is currently hitting like Barry Bonds.
At what point on that graph do you bench Theriot for Cedeno? His OPS is now down to .793. If it keeps going down - and I think that it will, but just to be clear I'm not arguing it based on the fact that I can draw a trendline on the graph - how far down does it have to go before you would be in favor of benching him?
Something to muse over on a Sunday.
Update by Byron (Pestilence): My apologies to Colin for jumping on his post, but this isn't really worth it's own post, and I dig the Ryan Theriot graph. Anyhow, tip of the cap to Razzball for linking to us and to an enjoyable little post over at Cardinals Diaspora. I'm especially a fan of videos #6, #4, and #8... in that order.
I had to shrink your graph,
I had to shrink your graph, Colin, because if it is much wider than 420 pixels, then it will look wrong on some computer screens. Apologies, and we'll hopefully fix that at some point in the future.
Hot hand
Isn't the "hot hand" argument in favor of Cedeno? The only real reason I can see that Theriot's playing ahead of Cedeno is that he hasn't done anything to lose the job. You know, sort of like it would be unfair unless Theriot starts to really suck. I'm not saying I support that decision necessarily, but I'm fairly certain that would be the reasoning.
Although...
the nice thing is, we can use this graph to extrapolate when Theriot's OPS will hit zero.