Usain Bolt does it again, breaking the world record in the 200 meters!

This posting is not about hot hands, but rather about hot feet. It's also not so much about streaks, but simply the magnitude of a performance. What I'm talking about is the world record 9.58 seconds run in the men's 100 meters yesterday by Jamaica's Usain Bolt at the World Championships in Berlin, Germany. As shown below, Bolt has been lowering the world record quite dramatically, in an event where the record used to come down incrementally, often one-hundredth of a second at a time (you can click on the chart to enlarge it).


As you'll recall, Bolt set the previous record at last year's Olympic Games despite slowing down at the end. Yesterday's performance gives us a better idea of what Bolt is capable of when he runs hard the whole way.

Tiger Woods had one of his major streaks broken today at the PGA golf championship, at the hands of Y.E. Yang. As described in this ESPN.com article:

Woods was 14-0 when he went into the final round of a major atop the leaderboard. He had not lost any tournament around the world in nine years when leading by two shots.

None of that mattered to Yang, a 37-year-old South Korean who hit the shots everyone expected from Woods. Leading by one on the final hole, Yang slayed golf's giant with a hybrid 3-iron that cleared the bunker and settled 12 feet from the cup.

Yang made the birdie putt and shouted with joy as he pumped his fist. That gave him a 2-under 70, and a three-shot victory when Woods missed yet another short par putt and shot 75.

A week ago, I traveled to Washington, DC to attend the annual convention of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR). A highlight was the local area former players' session, with Frank Howard (representing the old Washington Senators) and Rick Dempsey (representing the nearby Baltimore Orioles). With moderator George Michael of "Sports Machine" television fame leading the way, the players provided a lively and thoughtful discussion.


Howard is 6-foot-7, so I wanted to get a picture of him standing up, to dramatize his height. Also, my family is from Los Angeles and Howard played for the Dodgers from 1958-1964; with my 1962 birth year, I would have no recollection of that era, but my father would.

As a prototypical power-hitter for much of his career (until he learned to become more selective and raised his walk totals), Howard could experience both extreme hotness and coldness. On the positive side, between May 12-18, 1968, Howard hit 10 home runs in six games.

On the negative side, however, Howard once struck out seven times in a doubleheader, a record he shares with a few other players. (Howard told the story a little differently at the SABR session, saying that he struck out six straight times and then hit into a double play, thus producing eight outs in seven at-bats. Retrosheet's archived box scores of the games apparently in question -- Game 1 and Game 2 -- do not support this version, however.)

When I mentioned seeing Frank Howard speak at the SABR conference to my dad, he told me that he had seen Howard play basketball for Ohio State against UCLA in Los Angeles way back when. Since I was now in the habit of looking things up, I searched the library website at my home university for documentary evidence of Howard playing a college basketball game in L.A. Here are some brief excerpts of what I found...


When all was said and done, I learned a lot about Frank Howard, namely his highs and lows in the batter's box, and that he had played college basketball. It seems that he was capable of noteworthy performances in either sport, although whether they were beyond chance variation, I don't know.

Fresh off of a perfect game in his last outing, Chicago White Sox pitcher Mark Buehrle came out smoking tonight against the Minnesota Twins. As described in this game article, Buehrle "retired the first 17 batters on Tuesday night to set a record with 45 outs in a row" (the 17 batters from tonight were added to the 27 from the perfect game and the last batter from the start before that). Once Buehrle got the record, however, Minnesota batters started to get to him, leaving Buehrle as the losing pitcher in a 5-3 Twins win. As one of the commentators on ESPN's Baseball Tonight just noted, the previous record for consecutive batters retired was shared at 41 by Buehrle's White Sox teammate, Bobby Jenks.

Golfer Mark Calcavecchia earlier today birdied nine straight holes (the third through eleventh) to set a new PGA record. Such a record reflects not only great putting, but also great shooting at all stages to put oneself in position to have makeable birdie opportunities. Quoting from the above-linked New York Times article, "[Calcavecchia's] nine birdie putts were from 12 feet or closer." Even if all putts were from standard length, however, they'd still be more difficult than, say, free-throw shooting in basketball. Whereas a hoop is a hoop, golf greens have subtle curvatures, which require players and their caddies to develop an ability to "read the break."

Mark Buehrle of the Chicago White Sox just minutes ago pitched a perfect game against the Tampa Bay Rays. A perfect game is the ultimate in hot pitching, as it requires a pitcher to retire each and every opposing batter. Beyond pitching a no-hitter (which Buehrle had already done once in his career and which I analyzed here), the pitcher of a perfect game also allows no walks, hits no batters, has his fielders (and himself) commit no errors, etc. Buehrle's is just the 18th perfect game in major-league history.

Jamie McOwen, a Single-A minor-league baseball player, put together a 45-game hitting streak, which ended last night. For those not familiar with the levels of play in professional baseball, in order of increasing skill level, there's A, AA, AAA, and ultimately the major leagues.

As I watched yesterday's dramatic men's Wimbledon singles final -- won by Roger Federer over Andy Roddick 16-14 in the fifth set for Federer's record 15th Grand Slam singles title -- the key factor that stood out to me was Roddick's consistency in getting his first serves in. Roddick bested Federer in first-serve percentage, 70-64, which contributed to Federer's complete inability to break Roddick's serve -- until the very last game of the match. Some interesting serve-placement graphics are available here.

The Colorado Rockies won again today, 5-4 over Pittsburgh, giving the Denver-based franchise 16 wins in its last 17 games (game-by-game log). The spurt started about a week after Colorado fired manager Clint Hurdle and replaced him with Jim Tracy. As a managerial firing would suggest, the Rockies got off to a terrible start this season. From April 11-25, the team dropped 10 out of 12. As a further indication of how poorly the Rockies started the season, even with all their recent success they still trail the first-place L.A. Dodgers in the National League West by 9.5 games!

Kayla Braud of Eugene, Oregon finished her high-school softball career by getting a hit in 103 straight games. Even if, as is probably the case, her talent level is way above that of the pitchers she faced, you figure walks or a lucky catch by the opposition somewhere along the line would have ended her streak! (article, video).

Ichiro Suzuki's 27-game hitting streak, which I blogged about yesterday, is gone, just like that!

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Randy Smith, who once held the NBA record for consecutive games played at 906, has died at age 60.

Seattle Mariner outfielder Ichiro Suzuki has now gotten a hit in 27 straight games, heading into tonight's action (Twins at Mariners). Though far away, to be sure, from Joe DiMaggio's record 56-game hitting streak, Ichiro is considered by some writers to be among the major-leaguers most capable of going on a long streak. For one thing, he's gone on several streaks of 20-or-more games during his career. Further, he rarely walks, which maximizes the number of official at-bats (and thus chances to extend the streak) he gets in each game. With amazing regularity, Ichiro has been drawing almost exactly 50 walks per season in recent years. This article from a few days ago (when Ichiro's streak was at 25 games) provides additional background.

Today is the 20th anniversary of a 22-inning game between the Los Angeles Dodgers and Houston Astros (box score). Houston ultimately won, 5-4. From a streakiness perspective, the thing I've always remembered about this game is L.A.'s John Shelby going 0-for-10.

Looking at Shelby's career statistics, he clearly had a bad year with the bat in 1989, hitting only .183. (63-for-345). A .183 batting average translates into a .817 (i.e., 1 - . 183) failure rate on each at-bat. Raising .817 to the 10th power, for the probability of 10 successive failures (assuming independence of events), yields .133 as the likelihood of Shelby's going 0-for-10. We have not, of course, taken into account the quality of the opposing pitchers or any other factors, so this will have to be a rough estimate.

A 13% chance of Shelby going 0-for-10 is not astronomically small by any means. It's still fairly rare, however. The following figure shows Shelby's probabilities of getting 0, 1, 2, 3, etc., hits out of 10 at-bats. Not surprisingly, the likeliest scenarios were for him to get 1 or 2 hits. For the probability of 1 hit (and 9 failures), for example, we would take .817 to the 9th power, then multiply the result by .183, thus yielding .0297. There are 10 different ways to get exactly 1 hit out of 10 (i.e., in the first at-bat, or in the second, ... , or in the 10th), so we multiply .0297 X 10, yielding .297 (which is shown in the figure).


Shelby also had a higher probability of getting 3 hits in the game than 0 hits, but the chances start tailing off once we get to 4 hits. The above probabilities were obtained from the Vassar Binomial Calculator.

The first six games Roger Federer served Monday at the French Open, he won each at love. In other words, he won a perfect 24-of-24 points on his serve to open the match. Yet, Federer lost the first set. He could not break the serve of his opponent, Tommy Haas, and Haas prevailed in the first-set tie-breaker. Ultimately, Federer prevailed, 6-7, 5-7, 6-4, 6-0, 6-2.

Tennis great Rafael Nadal had his 31-match winning streak at the French Open halted. As one of the Grand Slam tournaments (along with Wimbledon, and the U.S. and Australian Opens), the French Open has a 128-player draw for men's (and women's) singles. A player therefore must win seven straight matches to take the French championship in a given year. Nadal had won the last four men's singles championships, plus his first three matches this year.

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In NCAA men's regional baseball action, the University of Texas beat Boston College, 3-2, in an amazing 25-inning game. Perhaps even more remarkable than the overall length of the game, Longhorn reliever Austin Wood pitched 12-plus innings of no-hit ball!

The Detroit News has an article on the 25th anniversary of the 1984 Detroit Tigers' 35-5 start to the season (thanks to Mark Pattison for bringing the article to my attention).

Boston Red Sox slugger David "Big Papi" Ortiz finally ended his long homerless streak.

Two long baseball streaks ended today:

Howard College, which came into today's round of the National Junior College Athletic Association baseball regionals with a 57-0 record, lost to Temple College, 8-2. Howard is still alive under the double-elimination format, but the chance at a virtually unheard-of undefeated baseball season is gone. [UPDATE: Howard indeed went on to win the national JC title.]

The Washington Nationals' Ryan Zimmerman had his 30-game hitting streak ended today against San Francisco, going 0-for-3.

I've just created a Facebook group in conjunction with this blog, and I invite everybody to join. The Facebook group will be a venue for getting previews of analyses I'm working on, batting around ideas, sharing instances of sports streakiness any of us have recently seen, etc. In short, it will be for exchanging brief bits of information that might not warrant full postings on the blog. Just search within Facebook under "Hot Hand in Sports."