Mike Napoli and the Mystery of the Hot Streak

Imagine being terrible at your job. Supremely terrible, like if your job was to photocopy legal documents but instead you set them on fire. Or if your job was to take goats out to pasture, you led them into a minefield, Monday through Friday. Or if your job was to write sports-related words on the internet and you wrote this paragraph! Just awful!

On May 8, Mike Napoli went 0-for-3 with two strikeouts in a 7-0 loss to Toronto. That dropped his OPS to .533. That's a bad OPS for a backup middle infielder; Napoli is a first baseman, which means the bar is set considerably higher. It's a bar he's cleared with ease in the past. In 2011, for instance, Napoli had a .631 slugging percentage, which, you'll note, is a single stat while OPS is on-base and slugging percentages added together. This is all to say Mike Napoli was awful.

He was not alone. His team, the Boston Red Sox, was not hitting. They weren't pitching particularly well either, but if you can't score it doesn't matter how many runs you allow after the first. The Red Sox were depending on Mike Napoli along with a few other hitters, but Napoli was the one who had been least productive, as you'll remember: .533 OPS. But for you traditionalists, he was batting .161.

Then Mike Napoli got hot. Hot is a good thing for a hitter to get. From May 10 through Monday's games, Napoli has hit .311/.404/.733. That's MVP-level production, but even that doesn't do Napoli justice. (This should not be confused with Napoli Justice, the 2014 direct-to-DVD film starring Steven Seagal as agent Napoli Justice and Mike Scioscia as Police Chief Johnson.) In a seven game stretch from May 19 through Monday, Napoli hit .440/.500/1.080. In those seven games he hit five homers.

That is what a hot hitter looks like, but mostly "hot" is a way we think about hitters. We think that hot hitters are more likely to get a hit than cold hitters. We want the guy who just homered up to bat again in a big situation, not the guy who struck out a few innings ago and has not had a hit in the series. This is likely true even if the guy who just homered is Bobby Backup and the guy without a hit is Johnny Allstar. We fans aren't the only ones who think this way, either. Hitters do, too. So do coaches, managers, and other players. They don't want to face the hot guy. Nobody wants to face the hot guy. They'll all pick the cold guy, even when he has the longer track record of success.

But while hot is a good thing to be, it's also a fleeting thing. Studies have shown that "Studies have shown" is an uninteresting way to start a sentence, but other more pertinent studies have shown that being hot is not predictive above and beyond the normal talent level of the player. That means that while Mike Napoli might feel hot, look hot, heck, he might even in some way be hot, he's no more likely to get a hit in his next at-bat than he is had he not homered in five of the last seven games.

There are likely many reasons a player gets hot. In Napoli's case there are two reasons being reported in the media. The first is that he did some video work with teammate Dustin Pedroia and realized he was doing something wrong mechanically at the plate. The second reason is that a nine-year-old boy signed his baseball bat. Seriously.

This helps illustrate the fantasies and fallacies surrounding hot streaks. Five homers in seven games is typically about the time when beat writers start reporting that Napoli refuses to eat anything but Eggy-O's cereal for breakfast and hasn't changed his underwear in a week. Similarly, while there is no good reason why a boy's signature on a bat would improve hitting performance, there's also no real reason why Napoli moving his hands slightly would turn him from the worst hitter in baseball to the best. That makes more sense, but it doesn't quite pass the smell test either. If Napoli was holding his hands wrong and he simply corrected his mechanical flaw, wouldn't he go back to hitting around his career numbers? So what's this five homers in seven games stuff?

Napoli's mechanical adjustment likely helped. Maybe meeting that nine-year-old helped too. There are surely reasons behind hot streaks, but figuring them out is a fool's errand. A doomed one, too, because hot streaks, by nature, don't last long enough to study. Baseball is far too difficult to maintain a 1.580 OPS all season long, no matter who signs your bat, how you hold your hands, or how long you wear a specific pair of underwear.

So imagine being terrible at your job. You are setting legal documents on fire and blowing up goats, but then imagine you stand a different way while photocopying those documents and they're instantly the best photocopies anyone has ever seen. You hold the gate open for the goats differently and all the mines disappear. You are amazing at your job. You are incredible. You are Mike Napoli, and you are hot. That doesn't mean that, when your next chance comes, you will stay that way.