Taking a look at walk and strikeout factors, 2010-2012

Whenever people are thinking about park factors they usually go about it by thinking that "this park suppresses doubles by 5%", but what they usually forget about is that park factors also play a role and strikeouts and walks. Jeff Sullivan of FanGraphs looked at these factors, and it can be read here.

But most people, when they think of park factors, consider what happens to the baseball once it’s put in play. This park increases doubles; this other park reduces home runs. These are the easiest park factors to understand, absolutely, and they’re generally the easiest to explain. Fenway Park has the Green Monster, which does things. Coors Field is at elevation, which does other things. I don’t need to explain this stuff to you.

Finding these factors are fairly simple. To find the unintentional walk park rate all you have to do is divide unintentional walk rate when at home and the unintentional walk rate when away. The same is said for the strikeout park factor.

Let's take a look at a few examples. Nationals Park has decreased walks by 13% which is one of the biggest effects. U.S. Cellular had the biggest effect, having increased walks by 20%. In terms of strikeouts, Nationals Park has also hurt strikeouts by 6%.

Dodger Stadium on the other hand has hardly had any effect on these factors. It has only increased both strikeout and walk percentages by only 1%.

Question for the community:

1) What do you think leads to some of these bigger increases or decreases in strikeouts or walks?