Per pitch f/x, The average curveball against Holliday:
Speed (MPH) 77.34
Break x (inches) 0.87
Break z (inches) -2.5

130 CB faced, 32% Out of the zone, 15% swing and miss, 18% foul, 19% In Play Outs, 5% hits

For comparison, Daric Barton (who had similar BB to K ratio in 2008,) the average curveball:

Speed (MPH) 77.54
Break x (inches) 2.14
Break z (inches) -4.82

152 CB faced, 51% out of the zone, 5% swing and miss, 12% foul, 13% In Play Outs, 3% hits

Not much help there in the data, but confirms what we know that Holliday is facing an “easier” curveball. I wish I could pull up the average batter against CB in 08 instead of individual data. I don’t have time right now, but just looking at Barton, it appears Holliday has benefited from a weaker curve as he misses more of them but still gets more hits, again, very limited.

is how they want to point at his entire career’s away numbers…. but decline to look at how well he has done on the road in the past 3 seasons, you know, the ones that likely have a lot more bearing on the near future than the ones done 4-5-6 years ago. .815, .860, .896. Thats why the guy has done on the road the last three years. Anyone who is complaining about that and wants to use it as a put down is out of their realm in terms of making a good argument.

I understand your complaint but then if you are going to focus on that, then why not go all the way and tell all the lazy data sources to include “OBP x SLG” in their data?

Because focusing on his road numbers is a short-hand way to having a better comparison of what his true talents are.

Sure, 3 years are better, that’s why I like using ESPN’s data before, but then Baseball-Reference’s pages open up sooo much more quickly than trying to click through to get to ESPN’s stats.

Ideally, you take the top five road stadiums for the player in terms of AB/PA and get an average and then scale the home park stats for that average AB/PA before adding that to his road stats to get a better feel for his overall talent level, unskewed by his home park. But that’s too hard to do easily, you have to cut and paste data and create formulas to do that.

Meanwhile, it’s very easy to pull up road stats and start comparing.

But that’s why we use OPS today, it is much easier to use that over OBP*SLG and close enough. Road stats are not perfect but they are close enough, though that would be an interesting stat project to do. If you have time to swim through ESPN’s player page, great, but baseball-reference and other sites can provide you his career road numbers easier.

About how others are boosted by Coors, I would think if you took the NL stats and see what happens to the batting line if you remove Coors, it probably won’t affect it much. Just, as I expect, it wouldn’t affect most players you would chose to compare against Holliday very much.

About ignoring half the data, if half the data is horribly skewed and you know that it is skewed, then yes, it is a good thing. It is kind of like the joke about looking for the quarter near the lamp when you actually lost it out in the darkness: the light might be better but the answer is not there. If anything, it would be better just to remove all the Coors data from the player and compare, that would be better than including Coors, as the purpose we are aiming for here is not accuracy of his talent level on an overall basis, but rather a comparison with other players. Coors will skew some players (NL West opponents) more than it would most other teams that don’t play there that often, so removing that skewed data from the database would be the ideal situation for comparing him with other hitters.

But that is a lot of work to do. Much easier to click on-line and provide his road numbers.

I understand your point: I’ve been using ESPN’s 3 year road numbers since 2002 now for comparisons. But this seems like a lot of vitriol when the road numbers are clearly better than his career numbers, just not ideal ultimately.

I mean, even with your adjustments above, things are not ideal. Look at what happened to KC over the past 10 years or so. If you look at their park factors on baseball-reference.com, they were league average forever. Then suddenly they became a hitter’s park and there was no change in the dimensions. Climate warming? No, but over time pitcher’s parks opened up in their division, Cleveland, Detroit, etc., which skewed things for them.

Ideally you adjust each stat line for each park up or down based on park factors. But what is the “right” way to do that? Seems like every expert has their own way and, for example, I don’t care for the way Bill James does it in his book, as only the teams that particular team played will affect the park factor that year. Thus if they faced SF, LA, and SD instead of CO and AZ, their park might skew hitters rather than pitchers. But I don’t know what the “right” way is either, I just know that’s wrong.

And again, we are talking about supercomputer calculations to adjust each players park by park statline OR we take their road numbers that we can find on-line and complain.

That’s why I’ve been saying for years that Hank Blalock is horribly overrated, his numbers are horrible on the road, great at home, and the difference is great enough that even if we did all the adjustments you did, it won’t change the results. Because if he goes to a team that don’t go to Texas very often, like the NL East, he’s not going to amass many ABs there and his road numbers will be what he’s hitting.

just going to copy/paste from my blog on Holliday’s move to Oakland

Here are the components of Holliday’s offensive value I can currently think of (anyone think I’ve missed something please let me know)

Batting Average

This will drop, and I actually think it will be a lot more than people have been talking about so far. Batting average is suppressed at the Coliseum (mostly due to the large foul territory and outfield flies going to die) and Holliday would likely see his batting average drop largely coming over from Colorado. And these aren’t small differences in ballparks, using the spreadsheet at the bottom of David Gasko’s excellent batted ball article reveals just how large the gap is in ballparks. There is more than a 10% increase in infield flies going from Coors to McAfee, a lot of this due to the expansive infield foul ground. Fly balls do indeed go to die, but the level that they do is staggering. There is about a 10% increase in Outfield Flyball Outs in Oakland than Colorado.

The suppression doesn’t stop with flyballs though. Ground balls go for singles about 5% less in Holliday’s new home park. This is especially relevant as Holliday puts the ball in play on the ground almost 46% of the time and is a .293 career hitter when he does. Unfortunately I think the .293 BABIP he enjoys on those ground balls will drop this year.

Holliday is a career .319 hitter, with numbers the last 3 years of .326, .340 and .321. With the amount of fluctuation in batting average and the difference addressed above (not to mention the likely drop in number of HR’s) I would not be surprised to see Holliday hit below .300 this year. Of course batting average isn’t the end all be all stat but for those out there screaming “Finally, the A’s have a .300 hitter for the first time in forever!” you may want to temper your enthusiasm. Also realize that the difference between a .319 hitter and a .300 hitter in 600 AB is 12 hits, or like 2 a month, which isn’t all that big a deal.

Walking

There doesn’t seem to be any real difference in walks between ballparks. Holliday did see a large jump last year in walk percentage, 12.1% being 3.5% over his career average. Hard to say how much of this is noise and how much is improving discipline. He did swing the bat about 2% less of the time last year than his career averages, about equally distributed between pitches in and out of the strike zone. So he probably has been more selective about which pitches to hit, which is a good thing. I don’t buy much into things like “batter protection” in the lineup affecting walk rates, so while offensively his entire surrounding cast won’t be as good as it was in Colorado, he’ll likely bat ahead of Jack Cust so it won’t be that different. Expect Holliday’s walk rate to be somewhere around 10% this year, which would be an ISO-OBP of somewhere around .075.

Power

This is by far the biggest gamble in bringing Holliday to Oakland, how much power will he lose coming here? The most telling stat by far in the spreadsheet is the HROF, or Home Run Outfield Fly. Oakland 0.93, Colorado 1.22. And the “humidor” argument doesn’t work here, though the spreadsheet is from 03-07 (and regressed to the mean), Gassko states:

At first, I thought this might be due to the installation of the humidor, but the park factor for home runs per outfield fly at Coors has been fairly stable since 2003, so that doesn’t look to be the case.

This means fly balls go for HR nearly 25% less of the time in Oakland as opposed to Colorado. The HR tracker courtesy of Hit Tracker doesn’t bode well for Holliday’s HR power in Oakland either.

All of those 400 foot HR to center are not going to be HR in McAfee, with the center field wall being both deeper and much higher than the one in Coors Field. Now to be fair to Holliday, his 2007 HR Chart

looks nothing like his 2008 one and much more like a right handed batter’s would. So it’s possible that his 2008 chart is more of an aberration than the norm, which would be much better for his power numbers in Oakland.

But don’t forget there’s more to power than just HR (though they are the greatest part of it). Colorado inflates triples greatly while Oakland suppresses them a bit, though Holliday doesn’t hit many of those anyway. Expect less doubles too, there’s about a 20% difference in Flyball doubles between Oakland and Colorado although there is also about a 15% increase in groundball doubles in Oakland to counteract that. Line Drive doubles, which is where most doubles come from, is about the same in both parks.

So Holliday’s power will definitely drop in Oakland. He’s posted ISO-SLG the past 3 years of .261, .267, and .217. I wouldn’t be surprised to see this drop to around .200 this year assuming the .217 is more representative of his true talent than the .261/.267 ones.

Baserunning

It’s really hard to put value on Holliday’s baserunning abilities. Before last season he was 38 for 53 in SB attempts, 71% base stealer. Not particularly good, and since Moneyball taught us Stolen Bases aren’t very useful it shouldn’t have mattered much with the A’s.

But then 2008 comes along and those previous assumptions may have been squashed. Holliday was an incredible 28 for 30 last year in steals, 93%. The A’s too ran a lot more than before, their 88 SB was in the top half of the league. Granted 25 of those were Rajai Davis who might not be on next year’s team, but Mark Ellis stole 14 and Ryan Sweeney 9, and Aaron Cunningham stole 17 in the minors/majors. So the A’s certainly don’t seem to be adverse to running like they may have come off as being in the past.

Holliday probably won’t post that high a SB% or likely steal that many this season though, both because last season was so out of line and the A’s still aren’t as heavy a SB team as the Rockies. I could see him going like 18 for 23 this year though, which does add positive value to his offensive arsenal.

So to sum it up, Holliday is going to be hurt pretty bad by the move from Colorado to Oakland, but I think his final line will still be something along the lines of .300/.375/.500, which is still a 3-4 WAR player, just not quite the same offensive monster that dominated Coors Field.

With that rant over, there’s a question I have for those of you who think you have good baseball eyes or have mad Pitch f/x skills. One theory about why Holliday might benefit more from hitting in Coors than the average player is that he’s a bad at hitting curve balls. Since curve balls don’t curve as much in the thinner air, that eliminates a large weakness he has. Do you buy that?

Holliday’s interdivisional road games include a bunch in power-supressing parks (Petco, AT&T and Dodger Stadium, even though the last two have fluctuated a bit over the last few years)

Matt Holliday’s performance numbers are indeed very interesting as he does seem to have a special affinity for hitting in Coors Field. I decided to take a look at what his 2008 park-adjusted numbers would translate to at McAfee Coliseum and also to look at his three-year park adjusted numbers at home. I think it is also interesting to take a look at the delta of his home/road OPS splits for not just 2008, but the recent past as well.

In 2008 Holliday posted raw slash lines of .329/.410/.653/.963 according to baseball-reference.com. Using espn’s park factors, his line would normalize to .307/.397/.516/.913. Applying the park factors for McAfee yields a slash of .292/.385/.489/.874 or a difference of nearly one hundred points from his raw numbers. Given that he will be adjusting to a new league, it seems likely his 2009 lines at home will be a bit less. FWIW, if you combine the normalized home numbers with his 2008 road numbers he would have put up a total line of .310/.405/.465/.870. Still a pretty good player, but he would drop from 5th in the NL in OPS to 23rd.

Holliday’s 2007 MVP runner-up season yielded home splits of .376/.435/.722/1.157. Applying 2007 park factors for Coors yields a revised slash of .338/.413/.618/1.031 with a total loss of 13 hits of which six were doubles, two were triples, and four were home runs. The story for 2006 is much the same as his slash is reduced from .373/.440/.692/.1.132 to .328/.381/.618/1.000. The three-year adjusted home split would end up being .325/.393/.581/974.

The interesting part is when the delta between home and road OPS is examined. The example for 2008 in the main post makes an argument that his home and road deltas are not all that different and offers explanations and adjustments to support that fact. However, when you look beyond 2008 the waters get a bit murkier. Holliday’s 2008 delta between home and road OPS was a mere .105 points, but it was by far the best of his career as it represents both his best ever road OPS and his worst ever home OPS. His deltas in previous years, going backwards from 2008, were .297, .313, .273, and .355.

The 2008 normalized home OPS for Holliday is .913 which is very much in line with the road adjusted OPS of .903 above. However, if we look at Holliday’s normalized 2007 home OPS of 1.031 and apply the additional forty points of OPS adjustment identified above to his road OPS of .860 we still have an unexplained delta of .131. The same exercise in 2006 yields a normalized home OPS of 1.000 and an adjusted road OPS of .859 for an even larger unexplained delta of .141. So while it is somewhat straightforward to explain his delta for 2008, the only way it would be possible to put much stock in that explanation is to say he has learned to hit much better on the road while losing some of that skill at home. Another alternative would be to say that 2008 was a statistical aberration and he will return to a more typical spread in the future. Of course, we won’t be able to test that hypothesis as he will no longer play at Coors Field.

Someone smarter than me will have to explain what, if anything, this all means. The only thing I am pretty sure of is that Holliday is probably going to lose tens of millions of dollars by having to play his walk year in a new league in a pitchers’ park.

Despite being perhaps the worst division in baseball last year, the NL West had its share of excellent pitchers – Lincecum, Webb, Peavy, etc, against whom Holliday played a fair share of his games.

With the move to the pitching weak AL West (Seattle and Texas have horrible staffs, the Angels are fairly solid), will his numbers be in any way affected by the quality of the opposing pitchers he faces?

If so, is there a way to calculate exactly how much?