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Pondering about park factors

 


Now, most of us who browse through these sites are certainly well aware with park factors and use them extensively in any baseball analysis, but I have some aspect of how it is done have bothered me for awhile now.

Namely, that most of the time we just have a flat number to multiply our raw OPS by. and we might look into how it inflates HR/Hits / doubles ... but..

1. it doesn't really take handedness into account

2. it doesn't take style into account.

Let's use the example of Yankee stadium , everyone knows that it has a short right field while the rest of the dimension tend to be normal (and use to be huge). thus, through the history of the Yankees they also loved them left handed sluggers. since they can just hit a modestly well lifted fly ball and it go out.  by this logic the park factors should be much higher for lefties. Joe DiMMagio hitting .900 in the ole stadium is not the same as a lefty hitting .900 in the ole stadium.

But then it doesn't take style into account, for example. Derek Jeter's a right hander. but he's one of the most extreme opposite field hitting player in the game. . thus Jeter gets his share of Yankee stadium specials (12 of 17 HR hit so far this year at home, and looking at hittracker, he has yet to hit a no doubeter this year.)

A few more cases I ponder

A. no power guys in a hitter's park : for example, Juan Pierre put up a .308/.356/.382 line in his two full season at Coors then a .306/.354/.378 line in his 3 full seasons with the Marlins, basically indentical lines dispite changing from the one extreme to another. obviously it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that because Pierre has zippo power anyway. being in Coors does nothing to his game. (of course it also means he can't take advantage of it.) so OPS+ probably sell him short in that aspect.

B. guys who's ability goes against the park.  Let's look at Jason Bay, a dead pull right hander . Fenway's suppose to help your doubles / average but limit your HRs.  Bay's at 25 doubles so far but that is hardly out of his career context in a healthy good year. where as he has 30 HR, just 5 shy of his career high with a month to go. whie his average is significantly lower than career  . so what to make of this ? it doens't seem like Fenway's park effect is working properly with Bay.

This is obviously more of a random pondering than a fully thought out post. but would be something that we could look into . for example. maybe we can use .OPS of lefties + OPS of lefty against at home / home games   divide by OPS of lefties  + OPS of lefty against on the road  / road games  ? and then we could go further and classify players and see how parks effects them (like dead pull / all fields / opposite field / slap hitters



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Well the main reasoning behind doing it the way they do is to find how valuable a players contributions are within his run environment (which is the park effect). A certain player might be a good fit in a certain park (like possibly Pedroia in Fenway), and he’ll get some doubles and HR’s that would be outs in other parks, but that’s not really the point. The point is that, based on this years park effect (108), teams score 8% more runs in Fenway. So we adjust his contributions for that 8% change in run environment, to find out how valuable they actually are to his team winning. Whether he would or wouldn’t have contributed the same is irrelevant in this context, because they did happen, and they did help the team a certain amount, adjusted for run environment.

I get your point on the park factors, and it does have its weaknesses when trying to adjust what a player will do in a different park, but it’s purpose is to properly value the players contributions, and it accomplishes that. It would be interesting to see some work done on how a players actual offensive performance would translate to another park.

Quick question for anyone that wants to weigh in – I’ve never really understood what the pitching park fact and batting park factor is all about, does anyone have an explanation why there are two different park factors?

by Missing Barry on Sep 3, 2009 12:57 PM EDT reply actions  

There are component park factors

That will show differences for handedness, etc. But like Barry said, they are to be used in deciding how good a player would be in a neutral ballpark, not how valuable a player actually is for his team, which is the question most people are trying to answer. They would be useful for trade evals, etc. I’m not sure where to find them though…

by lookatthosetwins on Sep 3, 2009 1:15 PM EDT reply actions  

Still

park factors are calculated with the whole team, some players take advantage of their park a lot more than other players, so there are some pre existing weakness with this method, if a team like the Yankees do very well in taking advantage of their park (like they probably are right now, 7 of their 9 regulars are either switch hitters or lefties, and of their 2 righties, one is a big time opposite field guy and A-rod hit his share of opposite fielders too) then their factor probably looks very high, on the other hand, if you end up with 8 Juan Pierres for the mid 90s Coors it’s factor will probably say it’s neutural.

by RollingWave on Sep 4, 2009 8:57 AM EDT reply actions  

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