No Parking

Dave Paisley

Regular strikethree.com readers will know that I occasionally delve into the numbers behind the numbers, attempting to show just how complicated and messy real baseball can get. And when it comes to park adjustment factors, it just can’t get any more convoluted or messy.

In the good old days, nobody cared, ort even knew, about park factors. Oh sure, even the casual fan was aware that the green monster at Fenway made playing there a different game, but such factors were mostly regarded as park quirks or oddities than something that needed to be taken seriously into consideration.

And then came Denver. The amazing effect of thin air and balls flying further than ever before was just too big to ignore. With scoring around 60% above league average, even the skeptical were forced to take notice. It took a couple of years of guys like Lary Walker putting up enormous numbers, but eventually the penny dropped. This year we had the humidor, because some genius figured it was the balls drying out in the low humidity that caused them to travel further. Shame that didn’t work, except for maybe the month of April.

No, the thing that affects Coors is air density. A well hit fly ball will travel about 30 feet further than at sea level. It may not seem like much, but when you think of ho many guys there are with ‘warning track power" thirty feet can be a huge difference.

But you don’t have to take it lying down of course. There are ways to compensate. One is to push the fences out. This comes with its own problems, though. Push them 30 feet further out and you add almost 20% to the outfield area. That’s a lot of extra territory to cover, and it causes as many more problems as it solves. Bigger gaps, more space between the infielders and outfielders, more places for balls to drop in.

And none of the above takes into account the effects on pitching the ball and the less pronounced bite that a spinning ball will have in the thin air.

OK, so Coors is bad news. What’s the opposite? Until recently the best pitchers parks in baseball were Dodgers Stadium and Qualcomm in San Diego, but the effect was really pretty mild compared to the wild opposite extreme of Coors. However, two new parks have taken over that honor — Safeco Field in the American League and PacBell in the National League. The cold sea level air results in the exact opposite of Coors — dense air that is much harder to push a ball through. Even at that, the effect is still pretty mild, but only 10 feet off every fly ball turns a lot of home runs and doubles into routine outs.

I thought I’d take a quick tour round these parks and The Ballpark in Arlington, the best hitters’ park in the AL.

Perhaps the first thing to understand about all this is that there are thousands of ways to look at park effects. The main one, however, has usually been runs per game. This year, Coors Field has seen 44% more runs in games there than in Rockies games on the road. But life isn’t that simple. In home games, the Rockies scored an average of 5.97 runs while their opponents have scored 5.88. Despite that extremely close matchup, the Rockies have won 44 and lost only 31. On the road, though, the Rockies score a paltry 3.37 runs per game while their opponents muster up 4.85. All of that has resulted in a rather nasty 25-50 road record. So what’s the deal?

Are the Rockies hitters so inept that they’ve forgotten how to score away from Coors? Or are opposing pitchers so much more dominating at sea level? These massive disparities between the home team and their opponents performance in what are essentially mirror image games calls into question the precision with which we can measure anything we might care to call "park factor". Adjusting individual stats for any such park factor becomes even more questionable.

There are some huge anomalies in the individual numbers as you might expect. The Rockies are always on the lookout for what we might term "Coors pitchers" — those who might thrive in the rarefied air rather than asphyxiate in it. They may think they’ve found one in Denny Stark. So far he’s sporting a 3.12 ERA in Coors. Wow, that’s pretty good. Unfortunately, he sports a 5.67 ERA on the road. That’s a huge reverse from the norm. Is Stake likely to put up a career full of numbers like that? Of course not. How much sense does it make to "adjust" his numbers this year based on average park factor?

There’s a notion that Coors messes with pitchers’ heads, causing them to exhibit very odd numbers. Mike Hampton seems to be another case in point (Darryl Kile, RIP, was maybe the first big name to show this.) Hampton doesn’t have great numbers at Coors — a 5.68 ERA and 4-3 record. Based on that we might expect him to have a respectable ERA in the low 4’s and a nice W-L on the road. No such luck — he’s at 6.44 and 3-12. Not only that, he’s given up 17 homers on the road to only 7 in Coors. Of course, he’s pitched a lot more innings on the road, but none of that accounts for the difference.

On the hitting front, Todd Helton and Larry Walker are the consummate examples of how Coors helps a good hitter. Helton features a 1.127 OPS at home and .891 on the road. He’s a pretty good player that gets a hefty boost from Coors. Walker’s numbers are similar — 1.142 at home and .935 on the road.

There are more extreme examples — Terry Shumpert is a .904 OPS hitter at Coors this season. However that road OPS of .517 is Rey Ordonez territory.

So there’s a glimpse at the Coors story this year. Next week I’ll take a look at the other three stadiums and see how everything compares.

about the author

Beyond all the numbers, the fact remains that the Rockies would stink just about anywhere. Dave Paisley thinks maybe we should force George Steinbrenner to take them over as a penance for all this Yankee arrogance. Send other suggestions to:drdjp@strikethree.com.