RESEARCH: The huge variance in "normal" production
Apr 25 2012
In the early going of the season, we read a lot about "small sample sizes," and how they can affect our assessments of players with less than 50 AB or less than 20 IP, which we will call "trials" in this essay. We are consistently warned to wait until we have enough trials—a big enough sample—to "understand" what is really happening with player performance.
Unfortunately, nobody ever tells us what constitutes enough trials to make a big enough sample for us to make decisions. We're told, for instance, that we should wait until mid-May or even late May to start making decisions—presumably because the samples are big enough by then.
But they're not.
At the end of May, a full-time player will have 200 or so AB or 70 or so IP—still...
Almost!
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