Chapter 101 Question ○91

Why is it that in baseball, rookie of the year players generally don't perform well the following year? In 2002, third baseman Eric.Eric Hinske played ○ for the Toronto Blue Jays.Good results in 297, in 151 games, he hit 24 home runs, 84 RBIs, and won the Rookie of the Year Award of the American Baseball League that year.But in the following two seasons, his batting average was only 0.Two four three and ○.Two forty eight. (Strike rate: In baseball, the main indicator for evaluating a batter's performance. Generally speaking, a professional baseball player with a batting rate of 0.280 or above is considered a competent hitter. Editor's note).

This phenomenon is not uncommon.Rookie players elected to the Major League Baseball Association usually put up a record in their first season that would put established veterans to shame.But in their second year in the big leagues, despite the extra year of experience, many are not as good as they were the year before.Because of the frequency of this phenomenon, people even gave it a name: biennial syndrome.How to explain it? One possibility: It takes time for the opposing bowler to discover the weakness of the batsman.But if that explanation holds, all second-year players should see declines, not just rookies of the year.But on the whole, second-year players are generally better than new scorers.

A more plausible explanation is that biennial syndrome is just a statistical illusion.Not even the best golfer can be perfect all the time.Their batting average and other offensive statistics are likely to be much higher one year than others.By definition, only players who perform at an exceptional level can win the Rookie of the Year award. That is to say, in this year, their grades may be much higher than the average grades in the future.And in his second year in the big leagues, just behind this one.It should come as no surprise, then, that the second season was a bit worse. The phenomenon of biennial syndrome is called regression to the mean in statistics.Once randomness succeeds, regression to the mean is bound to occur.After a player plays a successful game with super performance, usually the performance of the next game will return to normal.But most of the time it does get worse.