THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

I could swear that Greg Rybarczyk and/or others did a much more rigorous analysis of the fence changes at Yankee Stadium, although I can’t find the link.

This story refers to some of Greg’s conclusions:
http://sports.yahoo.com/mlb/news?slug=jp-yankeestadium060109&prov=yhoo&type=lgns

Mike - You are not imagining it.  I remember Greg having this information a month ago, but I don’t have the link either.

Here is the link I was looking for:
http://waswatching.com/2009/04/19/is-the-new-yankee-stadium-a-homer-haven/

And some additional info here:
http://www.baseball-fever.com/showthread.php?p=1498586#post1498586

Hat tip to Greg from this thread:
http://www.insidethebook.com/ee/index.php/site/comments/is_the_ball_juiced_again/#46

Or just take it straight from the horse’s mouth (on April 23rd):

http://www.espnmediazone.com/mediacenter/20090429_wibb_engineer.html

By the way, they are high by a factor of 2 on teh number of extra home runs from the dimensions, the correct number is 9.  And there have been 4 non-homers to center field that would have flown the fence at the old park, so the net from dimensions is +5, not +20.  I have no idea how they got 20…

Ya gotta love the last sentence of their article:

While part of the increase in home runs seen in the Bronx can be pinned on the dimensions of the field and the height of the walls, two large factors will always remain: the quality of the hitter and the performance of the pitcher.

So is the general consensus now that there is NOT a “wind tunnel” factor when the wind blows out to RF?

MGL, I don’t think they said that, actually.

Here’s the key quote on the weather, broken into two parts:

“As far as the weather is concerned, there has been no consistent pattern observed in the wind speed and direction that would lead to an increase in home runs so far this year.”

They’re talking about the macro weather here, saying that the Bronx, NY has not seen unusual weather thus far in the season…

Second part of the key quote:

“Rather, any weather-related changes would seem to be due to differences between the old and new Yankee stadiums and their structural effects on the micro-weather regimes.”

They’re leaving open (very open) the possibility that the layout of the new stadium is influencing the wind patterns inside the stadium bowl in a different way than the old park did.  Which is what a lot of people think, although it is a very difficult thing to nail down and prove, particularly without performing a detailed wind study…

I would like to alert you guys to an analysis that Greg and I have been doing for a few weeks now, on and off.  It is nearly complete and we just need to write up our results in a coherent way.

We have been analyzing home runs using both hitf/x data (supplied to us earlier by Sportvision) and HT that Greg accumulates.  We have a total of about 820 home runs in the data base, of which about 50 are from the new Yankee Stadium (NYS).  The idea is to try to figure out if home runs are “carrying” differently in NYS than in other venues.  We make use of both the hitf/x data to nail down the initial conditions and the landing point and flight time from Greg’s observations.  The simplest way to think about what we are doing is to ask whether balls with the same (or nearly the same) initial conditions travel farther in NYS than in other places.  This type of analysis is a beautiful application of hfx/HT data.

I don’t want to reveal our results just yet, since I am in the process of doing some final checks.  However, in view of the fact that both the hitf/x data and the NYS issue seems to be timely, I did want to tell you what we are up to.

I just wanted to point out that even if the dimensions of the wall added 20 home runs, taking away those 20 home runs still results in an increase from 57 home runs to 85 home runs through the first 29 games of the season

Greg was also featured on Science Friday from NPR discussing this:

LINK

What an awful introduction by the Science Friday host…

Uh-oh the danger of hotlinking a picture becomes apparent here.

MGL, would you have preferred that he imitated Suzyn Waldman instead of Sterling?

Dave: actually, it’s their site that changed the picture.  If you click the article, you will see they messed themselves up, and I’m just propogating what they have.

Interestingly, the New York Times was there a couple of months ago:

http://bats.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/28/as-far-as-cashman-knows-dimensions-are-the-same/?scp=1&sq=kepner%20shpigel%20yankee%20stadium%20curved&st=cse

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/21/sports/baseball/21homeruns.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=kepner%20shpigel%20yankee%20stadium%20curved&st=cse

(From my brother, who works there.)

Yeah Tango, I did not mean that you linked the wrong picture.  Rather that when you ‘hotlink’ a picture, link directly to that image on someone else’s server, you are at their mercy that they do not change or delete the image.  (It also means that you use their bandwidth whenever this page is loaded.)

It is no big deal, it is just funny when the image gets changed and produces an incongruous result.