Lee Panas at Detroit Tiger Tales consistently produces interesting analysis. Now he’s working on a study about consistency. Fans love guys who they perceive as consistent performers, and tend to get infuriated with streak hitters (at least during the cold streaks). It turns out that the fans are on to something as Lee found that consistent players have better results.
But…there’s always a but.
He also found in his study, which is admittedly limited in that it looks at just 2006 and 2007 at this point, that consistency wasn’t particularly repeatable.
So, it does look as if performance is tied to consistency even though consistency is not repeatable from year to year. That is, consistency describes something about a player’s season more than it describes a player. If a player has an inconsistent season by the consistency statistic, that might be an indicator that he was injured or had some unusually bad luck which prevented him from hitting his best all year long. It also might mean that he’s a candidate to improve in the following season.
I encourage you to click through and read more about his methodology.