Putting Michael Cuddyer’s Hit Streak Into Perspective

Michael Cuddyer just finished going streaking. His 27-game streak, which lasted from May 28th to June 30th, was the longest since Dan Uggla’s 33-gamer in 2011. While he didn’t reach the 30-game benchmark that many sites use, 27 games is nothing to shake a stick at — Cuddyer’s streak was just the 135th of 25 or more games since 1916 that happened during the same season (there were also 18 that spanned two seasons, but I don’t count those. If you have a problem with that you can go suck a lemon). I didn’t have the time to go through all of those streaks, but I did have a chance to take a look at the streaks of 30 or more games, and I thought we could put Cuddyer’s streak into perspective.

To start, obviously, Cuddyer’s was at least three games fewer. That’s a given, and I didn’t need to explain that to you. Breaking down one of the 30-game-streak lists, which actually go back further than 1916, we find 54. But for our purposes here, we need to trim a little bit. We first eliminate the 12 streaks that span multiple seasons. I’m just not counting them. Nothing I do in September of one year has anything to do with what I do in April of the following year. It’s nonsense, as far as I’m concerned (feel free to disagree in the comments). We also have to eliminate the 12 streaks that occurred before 1916, which is the first season for which Baseball-Reference has game logs. They are:

Player	Games	Year
Bill Dahlen	42	1894
Ty Cobb	40	1911
Fred Clarke	35	1895
George Davis	33	1893
Hal Chase	33	1907
Ed Delahanty	31	1899
Nap Lajoie	31	1906
Cal McVey	30	1876
Elmer Smith	30	1898
Tris Speaker	30	1912

The Ty Cobb streak from 1911 seems like it would have been particularly awesome — he hit .420/.467/.621 for a .506 wOBA that year, and won the American League Most Valuable Player Award to boot. Chances are, he hit pretty freaking well during that streak. But we can’t say for sure because we don’t have the game logs. Or, we can’t directly compare it to other hit streaks because we don’t have the game logs.

In any case, we are left with 32 hit streaks. Three of the 32 streaks appear dubious to me — Moises Alou in 2007, Albert Pujols in 2003 and Ken Landreaux in 1980. During each of these streaks, there was a game in which the player had a single plate appearance, but was either walked or hit by a pitch, and thus did not have an official at-bat. These are still generally accepted streaks, and so I will accept them as well, but they don’t seem to be capturing the spirit of the thing. I just wanted to point that out. Mostly because I’m a nerd.

To make the comparisons, I took each player’s raw stats from their game logs as compiled by B-Ref, and then used the fantastically awesome Guts! page to help me calculate the wOBA and wRAA of each streak. Assuming I did all of that correctly (and there’s always a chance that I didn’t), here is how Cuddyer’s streak shakes out:

Player	Games	Year	BA	OBP	SLG	WPA	wOBA	wRAA
Joe DiMaggio	56	1941	0.408	0.463	0.717		0.528	36.7
Rogers Hornsby	33	1922	0.466	0.494	0.808		0.573	28.8
Tommy Holmes	37	1945	0.423	0.494	0.699	1.377	0.550	28.7
Ty Cobb	35	1917	0.464	0.516	0.754		0.593	28.7
Paul Molitor	39	1987	0.415	0.495	0.683	2.224	0.501	27.9
Rico Carty	31	1970	0.451	0.53	0.743	1.5	0.554	24.4
George Brett	30	1980	0.467	0.504	0.746	2.703	0.544	24.0
George Sisler	41	1922	0.454	0.489	0.615		0.501	23.7
Dan Uggla	33	2011	0.377	0.438	0.762	1.507	0.510	22.4
Chase Utley	35	2006	0.405	0.452	0.699	1.994	0.483	21.7
Albert Pujols	30	2003	0.39	0.471	0.712	2.611	0.501	19.7
Vladimir Guerrero	31	1999	0.386	0.431	0.756	2.066	0.499	18.8
Luis Gonzalez	30	1999	0.4	0.466	0.696	1.716	0.492	17.5
Eric Davis	30	1998	0.4	0.43	0.708	1.897	0.478	17.4
George McQuinn	34	1938	0.386	0.457	0.572		0.467	16.8
Ryan Zimmerman	30	2009	0.382	0.427	0.649	1.435	0.465	16.1
Nomar Garciaparra	30	1997	0.383	0.407	0.652	2.573	0.457	15.6
Stan Musial	30	1950	0.388	0.435	0.661	0.912	0.488	15.2
Goose Goslin	30	1934	0.376	0.443	0.616		0.472	15.0
Andre Ethier	30	2011	0.397	0.462	0.56	1.617	0.453	14.1
Willie Davis	31	1969	0.435	0.463	0.532	1.792	0.450	13.7
Sandy Alomar Jr.	30	1997	0.422	0.455	0.595	1.333	0.462	13.5
Moises Alou	30	2007	0.403	0.445	0.588	0.586	0.455	13.4
Pete Rose	44	1978	0.385	0.421	0.462	1.305	0.400	12.3
Ken Landreaux	31	1980	0.392	0.445	0.496	1.206	0.428	11.6
Sam Rice	31	1924	0.402	0.448	0.5		0.440	10.9
Michael Cuddyer	27	2013	0.372	0.4	0.575	0.693	0.423	10.5
Luis Castillo	35	2002	0.403	0.436	0.468	1.806	0.401	10.2
Dom DiMaggio	34	1949	0.34	0.418	0.487	0.631	0.420	10.1
Heinie Manush	33	1933	0.362	0.413	0.486		0.414	9.8
Benito Santiago	34	1987	0.346	0.36	0.559	0.353	0.397	8.2
Jerome Walton	30	1989	0.338	0.352	0.449	1.543	0.357	4.7
Willy Taveras	30	2006	0.349	0.404	0.426	0.660	0.370	4.6

One item of note — the WPA comes from B-Ref, and it appears that they don’t have WPA for any pre-World War II seasons. I’m not a mathematician, but I’m pretty sure Joe DiMaggio would have a positive WPA during his hit streak.

As you can see, Cuddyer’s streak wasn’t historically awesome, and if I went back and included all of the 27-, 28- and 29-game hit streaks, it might fare even worse. But it wasn’t the worst. It was worth more in wRAA than streaks that were as many as eight games longer. This strikes me as pretty cool, even as someone who knew that Luis Castillo’s streak wasn’t anything to write home about as it was happening back in 2005.

When the Rockies traded Seth Smith and signed Michael Cuddyer following the 2011 season, several people were critical of the moves, including myself. Then Cuddyer went out and underwhelmed when he did play in 2012, which was mainly the first half — he missed all but 19 games in the second half with an oblique injury — which didn’t help matters any. This year however, Cuddyer has silenced critics, and the hit streak is only part of that. If he maintains it, his 158 wRC+ will easily be a career best, and even though he has been an atrocious fielder in right field, he has already doubled his WAR from last season in roughly 2/3 the games played.

Hitting streaks the length of which Cuddyer just put together don’t come around every year, and they are a pretty interesting subject that I may dig into more in the near future. Players compile these streaks more frequently than they used to, but you still only have to look back to 2010 to find a year without a hitting streak of 25 or more games. He may not have had the best hitting streak ever, but Cuddyer’s streak was still pretty sweet, and while his defense will hold him out of any serious MVP discussions, he is putting together a pretty nice season overall.