I really didn't want to write this piece.  First off, Rich has gone to painstaking lengths to show that Pedro Feliz is a streaky hitter, and I hate to work towards debunking all that hard work.  Secondly, showing that Feliz isn't a particularly streaky batter is tantamount to defending his usefulness, something I never expected that I would need to do.

What Rich has done, on several occasions, it cherry-picked hot and cold streaks throughout Feliz' career and summed them up to show that he is only a good hitter a small percentage of the time. I use the phrase "cherry-picked" as parallelism, as Rich has somehow attributed Feliz' hot streaks to somehow "choosing" to perform well at certain times.

Whatever the actual reason for Feliz' perceived streakiness, the fact is that he actually isn't any streakier than the average player who doesn't walk a lot.  Scouts love to chant "speed never slumps," and it's probably true that players with serious wheels are less prone to prolonged cold streaks due to their ability to reach base without the benefit of a hard-hit ball.  Similarly, Sabermetricians love to chant, "walks, walks, walks: walks are the best!" Though I imagine most of them do so without regard to how walks rarely "slump" and provide a way for a hitter to help his team even when he hits a cold spell with the stick.

Anyway, determining the perfect type of player (walks, speed, etc.) to avoid hot and cold streaks is beyond the scope of this piece.  I just mean to show that the type of hot and cold streaks that Feliz has is common to every baseball player.  Without cherry-picking players to compare him to myself, I'll simply use the ten batters that Baseball-Reference.com deems most similar to Feliz to do these comparisons.  And while I'm certainly not going to siphon through the game logs of each of these batters and compare their hot streaks to their cold ones, I think B-R already provides us with a quick and dirty tool of measuring what Rich is describing as "cherry picking."

They give us how a player performs in wins versus losses.  Generally in team wins, your batters are facing lower quality pitching then in team losses.  Also, your team is probably swinging the bats well as a hole (hitting is supposedly contagious, after all).  And of course, if a player hits well, his team is more likely to win.  But it makes a decent measure of consistency; an inconsistent hitter would probably perform disproportionately better in his team's wind.  Do we see that when we compare Pedro's splits to the ten hitters with the highest Baseball-Reference similarity scores?

Indeed, Feliz does "well" by this measurement, although he doesn't really separate himself from the #3 thru #6 hitters on this list.  If Feliz really were the streaky, inconsistent cherry-picker that Rich makes him out to be, then we'd expect him to rank closer to Butch Hobson on this list.

Suppose that instead of using the B-R similarity scores we use our own?  Here is how Pedro ranks against the other players who have won Baseball Evolution Dave Kingman Awards this decade:

A shockingly similar list, particularly since Casey Blake appears on it twice.  From this data, it certainly seems possible that Feliz is guilty of cherry picking to some degree, just not the degree that Rich would have you believe.  It is in a baseball player's nature to go on hot and cold streaks, perhaps even more so for slow players who do not walk, and this is in addition to the natural statistical variation we would expect.  Rich's "discovery" is tantamount to realizing that as a right-handed hitter, Feliz performs better against southpaws.  While certainly true, it isn't at al out of line with what we would expect.  I am confident that if you went through game logs to find hot and cold streaks for any of the players on these lists, you would find similar disparity to what Feliz displays.

Basically, Rich, Pedro Feliz is already a bad enough player, and there is no need for you to work so hard to find another area in which he's deficient.