June 9, 2013

BP Unfiltered

A List of Home Run Streak Artists

by Andrew Koo

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I was watching Pedro Alvarez yesterday, smasher of 400-foot home runs and manufacturer of golden sombreros. Alvarez is one of a few streaky hitters who have excellent 2-3 game stretches of power, followed by long stretches of bat contact amnesia. I wondered which hitters hit home runs on back-to-back days most often, so I fired up our database and looked for games where any hitter homered. Then, I tabulated their performance the day after and took the leaders (data since 2011):

The “HR” column is essentially the number of times that the hitter homered on back-to-back days. So Giancarlo Stanton homered in 61 games and played a game the day after. In 24 of those subsequent games, he homered again (24 or less, depending on multi-homer games).

Here’s everyone whose slugging percentage is over 600 in “day after games” (minimum 25 “before games”):

Most of these players are just plain good at hitting. Alvarez came in at 29 games, 99 at bats, with 5 home runs and a 545 SLG.

For fun, here are the MLB-wide performances after one, two, and three homer games:

The day after Ike Davis homered three times, he went 0-for-5 with three strikeouts. That sums up Ike Davis.

Andrew Koo is an author of Baseball Prospectus. Follow @akoo
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