As of last nite, 16 hits for #42 in 2017. Never saw that coming!
But even more than that is #4 sitting in 2nd place with 13 hits on the year. The secret to #4 is that it repeated five times! That's unbelievable, any other C4L number that repeated in 2017 only repeated two times.
I'm thinking that repeaters could be the best clue to discovering which number will be the hottest number of the year for this game. For instance in 2016, #32 repeated 4 times and had 13 hits on the year. In 2016, #'s 4, 37 & 55 had 15 hits, so #32 wasn't the top dog, but it came close to being the biggest hitter. Trouble is if most of the repeat hits happen late in the year, then you cant tell much in the June/July timeframe. If you see a number with a lot of repeats in the first half of the year, chances are it's going to be in contention for biggest hitter of the year. As for #32 in 2016, well, it only repeated twice by July 1st, so that wouldn't have revealed anything about how it was going to do in 2016.
Notice above too, that #4 has been among the top C4L hitters for two consecutive years. Actually, from 1/1/15 until 12/21/17, it has 36 hits. That makes it the number one hitter for a little bit short of two years. Over the life of C4L, #4 has 40 hits, just one hit behind #'s 8 & 56 which have 41 and are tied for the most hits of any C4L number since 6/16/14 when the game began. So what's #4 going to do in 2018???
Numbers 8 and 56 had a so-so 2017. 8 had just 8 hits and 56 had 11, so they may be cooling off. #8 more so than #56. G5