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Missing the cycle

Posted by Andy on July 24, 2007

My post a couple of days ago about Padres players missing the cycle reminded me of something. I remember when I was a kid, listening to some post-game comments after a baseball game, the announcer saying that one of the players had "fallen a triple short of the cycle." It wasn't until a few years later that I realized what a silly comment that was. Triples are pretty rare, and I bet that hundreds of guys each year get at least one single, one double, and one homer in a game.

I've always wondered exactly which type of hit is the one missing most often when a player is one hit shy of the cycle. For the last several decades of MLB, I imagine it MUST be the triple.

I decided to use the PI to do a little sleuthing.Arbitrarily, I decided to look at the decade of the 1980s. I some degree, I wanted to avoid the offensive explosion of the 90's and the 00's.

First, I used the PI Game Finder, set the years to 1980 to 1989, and set singles, doubles, triples, and HR all greater than or equal to 1. This gives the total number of cycles, which is 27 times. First by Ivan DeJesus in April 1980 and last by Gary Redus in August 1989. The full list is here.

Now, by slightly adjusting the search parameters, setting each particular kind of hit to zero, I can find out how many "cycle misses" were in the 1980:

Missing the single: 45 times (Gregg Jefferies did it 3 times in less than a year!!!)
Missing the double: 152 times (I had to split to search into 1980-1984 and 1985-1989)
Missing the triple: 1444 times (I had to search each year individually, because there were so many)
Missing the homer: 472 times (1980-1982, 1983-1985, 1986-1989)

So, it is true that missing the triple is the most common (although not "hundreds iof guys each year" as I wrote above--more like 140 on average.) But let's dig a little bit deeper.

Let's look at the total number of each type of hit over that same period, 1980-1989, irrespective of whether it was involved in a cycle, a cycle-miss, or neither. I did this by looking at the leagues, year by year, and manually adding up the data (1989 NL for example):

Singles: 255,026
Doubles: 61,757
Triples: 9141
HR: 32,942

That's 358,866 total hits. If we re-state the chart above based on the odds of a given hit being each of the four types, this is what we get:

Singles: 1.4 to 1
Doubles: 5.8 to 1
Triples: 39.3 to 1
HR: 10.9 to 1

So, the meaning of this info is that if I tell you an unnamed player got a hit sometime in the 1980s and I don't give you any more information, then the odds are 1.4 to 1 that it was a single, 5.8 to 1 that it was a double, etc. This shows, for example, that homers are almost 4 times as more common as triples.

Now, finally, let's go back to the missed cycle data from above. There were 2113 missed cycles in the 1980s. If we simply scale that data (diving each number by 37.7) we get:

Missing the single: 1.2
Missing the double: 4.0
Missing the triple: 38.3
Missing the homer: 12.5

These numbers are pretty darn close to the overall frequency of these hits. (Note to stats gurus: I came up with the 37.7 factor just by finding the least squares residual between the 4 missed cycle numbers and the 4 total types of hit numbers).

What does it mean? Basically that the odds of missing the cycle by a given type of hit are pretty similar to the overall difficulty level of getting that type of hit that you need. We know that in practice, it's much more complicated than this. It depends a lot, for example, on a particular batter's past history against the particular pitcher.

You stats gurus can probably do a better workup on all of this data than I did. Please feel free!

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