Pujols, Mr. September

[G1911]

Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth

Yes, tiny sample size, but Oddhe came up with it in the final four games of his career needing a near impossible performance to break a record.

I don't know how to effectively test this with Baseball Reference where I can look up individual players etc., but I would guess that most guys that hit .270 have a stretch where they hit .556 for four games (or substitute average for whatever high achieving stat we like; while average is not the best stat overall I think it does a very very good job of tracking short term 'hotness'). They'll probably also have a stretch at .111. More than one, really. I would expect if we took, say, a thousand players and tested this, cutting up blocks of four games, the results would indicate it would be more surprising if Pujols did NOT have a stretch like this. I would be interested to know beyond hypothesizing.

I didn't watch those games, or the highlights. Maybe he got grooved one, there's a long history of that (McLain I think it was, lobbing a gift to Mickey for #500 as I recall) too, but I don't think there's a data problem here, even if that is what happened.