Beat The Streak
 

At the risk of rehashing something already posted before, this looks like an interesting game. Does anybody here play this? (Link to the game is in the story)...



http://mlb.mlb.com/NASApp/mlb/news/a...=.jsp&c_id=mlb

Beat the Streak run ends at 39
Connecticut fan falls short of tying game's longest string
MLB.com

Eighteen years ago, Milwaukee's Paul Molitor energized the baseball world with a 39-game hitting streak that fell 17 games short of Joe DiMaggio's legendary 56-game record.

Entering Monday night, Phil Gianatasio of Cheshire, Conn., also found himself 2 1/2 weeks away from surpassing the most famous streak in professional sports.

Who is Gianatasio you ask? He is one of the hundreds of thousands of fans playing MLB.com's most popular fantasy game -- Beat the Streak.

The premise of Beat the Streak is simple. Pick any hitter on any night. Get a hit, your streak continues. Get no hits, your streak ends, and you can start a new one the next day. Be the first person to break Joe D's record by hitting in 57 straight games and walk away with $100,000 in cash.

Gianatasio, a first-year Beat the Streak participant, built his impressive 39-game streak by selecting .300-plus hitters facing struggling pitchers. Hit machines like Albert Pujols and Bobby Abreu had been among Gianatasio's most common selections.

But when Gianatasio's pick for Monday, Miguel Tejada, went 0-for-3 against Toronto, the record-challenging run came to a quick end, leaving Gianatasio one game shy of the all-time Beat the Streak record of 40 games, set last season by 2004 champ Ken D'Introno. If no other fan is able to match or break his streak in 2005, Gianatasio is guaranteed four tickets to next year's All-Star Game in Pittsburgh.

"I never thought I could have done this well," said Gianatasio on Monday before his streak ended. "I'm getting married next month and could use the money to buy a car or put a down payment on a house."

Beat the Streak has proven to be quite a challenge since launching on MLB.com in 2001. This season there have been more than one million unique hitting streaks started by fans, with only 11 challengers able to get within 25 games of DiMaggio's record.

In addition to the chance of winning $100,000, some of the other benefits of playing Beat the Streak include:

• Easy to play -- doesn't require you to know hundreds of ballplayers like most fantasy games
• Takes 15 seconds to make your selection each day
• Since you can pick your hitters a week in advance, there is no need to log on every day to compete
• You can join the game at any time up until August -- and still have a chance to reach 57 games
• It's FREE

If you haven't started playing in 2005, sign up today. You're only 57 days away from winning $100,000 and earning your own place in history.

This story was not subject to the approval of Major League Baseball or its clubs.

Thanks for posting this. Sounds like it is well worth trying.

Neat. It actually seemed somewhat doable until I thought about it for a second. Assume that you can--by paying attention to pitching matchups--find players on any given day who have a .500 chance of getting a hit (seems about right since the best players average below .400 over the course of a season). To win this, you need to get it right 57 times in a row. So your odds of winning are 1 in 2^57 or 1 in 144,115,188,075,855,872. Even assuming that you can pick people with a .667 chance to hit the ball, your odds of winning are still only 1 in ~10,894,361,101.

Makes what DiMaggio did that much more impressive.

I'm surprised that QuikSand hasn't won this already.

Your calculations are for 57 hits in 57 consecutive at-bats. This game is to pick players with a hit in 57 consecutive games. 1 for 4 in a single game is still ok.

Good catch. So what are the best reasonable odds that a player will get a hit in any given game? 70%? 80%? (Assuming, of course, that you get to pick the most favorable player based on pitchers, etc.).

If you a assume a player has a 50% of getting a hit in any at bat. With 4 at bats per game they have a 93% chance of getting a hit at least once.

If you have assume a player has a 35% chance of a hit in any bat those odds decrease to about 82% chance of getting a hit.

A 300 hitter has a 75% chance of a hit in any game.

Thus a 300 hitter will has a 1 in 13 million chance of hitting in 57 straight games.

However, if you could be 93% certain a player will get a hit in a game the odds are 1 in 63. 1/(.93 ^ 57)


Todd

If we take a .330 hitter against a poor pitcher, making them a .450 hitter, the odds of a hit in one game are roughly (1 - (1 - .450)^4), or (1 - 0.0915), or 0.9085.

The odds of a 10 game streak (with this math) are then P^10, or .383.

20 game: .145
30 game: .056
40 game: .022
50 game: .0082
57 game: .0042

So that's a 0.4% chance of starting with a SPECIFIC game, getting 57 in a row. Since, however, you have (162 - 57) 105 chances to start the streak, the odds are (1 - (1 - P)^105), or 35.7%.

So clearly, even a good hitter going up against a poor pitcher does not effect the average very much, because 35.7% of people certainly don't get the 57-game streak.

Edit: I'm sure I goofed up the math somewhere, as my odds are way too high. Someone please correct me.

Very cool idea by MLB.

thread necromancy!

With the baseball season kicking off, I thought it might be fun to compete against fellow FOFC'ers in MLB's Beat the Streak contest. Unlike typical fantasy baseball, this requires only a tiny bit of time commitment (a minute a day - plus you can be inactive for days without it breaking your streak).

I have created a group for FOFC:

Signup: Beat the Streak | MLB.com: Fantasy

Group Name: FOFC
Password is: tcy2

joined