It’s a common complaint in the Mets blogosphere: “Lucas Duda is good, but he’s too inconsistent.”
But is it really true?
For this little experiment, we’ll define consistency as the how reliable a player is at producing an OPS close to their average. Inconsistent players will be those who have great highs and terrible lows while a consistent player will be pretty dependably near his averages.
I’ll look at four players to compare Duda to. All of them were said to be consistent by you the readers. Those four players are Martin Prado, Daniel Murphy, Robinson Cano, and Jose Bautista. Pay no attention to whether these players are better or worse hitters than Duda because that doesn’t matter in this discussion.
For this little test, I broke down each of the players’ 2014-2016 statistics into 20-game segments. For each segment, I took each player’s OPS. You can disagree with me about the length of the segments — and it was arbitrary — but I felt it produced a good amount of meaningful data points.
Each of these data points for each player was laid out in a histogram to show the distribution. A consistent player — one who abides by the Central Limits Theorem — would be one whose distribution is narrow while an inconsistent player would be all over the place.
Here is how each of these players fared:
Despite all these players being labeled consistent and Duda being labeled the opposite by fans, Duda is as consistent, if not more so, than any of these players.
So why is it that Duda is considered inconsistent while the others aren’t? I have a theory, but it’s somewhat anecdotal. Fans seem to dislike Duda because he is a high strikeout, low batting average player who hits a lot of home runs.
But that’s not consistency or inconsistency. That’s just a type of hitter. You can consistently be a productive high strikeout, low batting average home run hitter, which Duda has been over the last few years. His six-week slump last season only played into the narrative, but didn’t prove anything about whether he is truly “consistent” or “streaky” as his critics claim.
There are, of course, some problems with my data such as:
- not accounting for injuries
- some data points at the end of the season are longer/shorter than 20 games
- the data goes by game, not by at-bat or plate appearance
All that said, I still think this does a pretty good job at dispelling the notion that Duda is any more streaky than most players labeled “consistent” by fans. It’s all optics and perception and not based in real numbers.
Here’s the full data for anyone interested.
Note: stats are as of yesterday morning
