“Manny hits first HR of Spring Training!“
I was greeted by this ESPN headline today and it made laugh. No matter what I think – there are people that care and are clearly paying attention to spring training performances.
So what’s the deal with spring stats? We’ve been asked via Twitter (follow us here) and email whether spring stats are a valid predictor of regular season stats. Without scrubbing years of stats to find the mysterious patterns, I did a quick experiment to see if we could learn something new.
Observe Exhibit 1. This is a table of the top 10 hitters by batting average in 2008 and their respective spring training stats:
What do you notice?
How about the At Bats? 20-40 during spring as compared to 600-700 during the season. Wow. That’s quite a difference. Could we trust these spring stats as statistically significant? If there is any category where we could – it’s AVG.
According to the data, 9 of the 10 hitters batting over .300 in 2008 batted over .300 in the spring. Your MVP Dustin Pedroia is the one notable exception. So, either he is an outlier in this small data set or he had an abnormally good 2008.
Be careful all you people taking him as the 16th pick this year.
Now, being an analysis skeptic, I’m not entirely convinced, so let’s look at another piece of data – power. Enter Exhibit 2, a table of the top 10 HR hitters last year:
Does it look different? Well, it should. There is no clear correlation. Manny only had one jack in the Spring of last year in his 30 AB’s. Quentin, Gonzalez, and Cabrera accounted for only one homer between the 3 of them!
Let’s keep our eyes on spring stats this year and see if we can find actionable patterns, but for the time being, I would say: