THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Very cool looking graphs, but a quick question:

Shouldn’t the “night” data set (the inner ring) be our “control” and not show any trends? It looks like it has one of the strongest/most consistent patterns of all the elevations. (For SLG and AVG)

Have we got a link to the mechanics of how this data was generated?  I’m always interested in this sort of thing, going back to my Navy days and the celestial navigation they taught me…

I’m thinking that interpreting the data in the provided charts is going to be rather complicated given the change in position of the sun from day to day (i.e. the analemma).  Very interesting, though…

Lee - Good thought on the night data.  I’ll see if I can re-do the chart that way and how it looks.  It’s the first time I’ve tried a chart of this type, so I appreciate any suggestions.

Greg - the sun position data came from a spreadsheet that NOAA makes available, but I had to make a few small adjustments to change it to UTC instead of local time.
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/grad/solcalc/NOAA_Solar_Calculations_day.xls

Tom let me post it on his FTP site a while back.
http://www.tangotiger.net/chriscary/

Love the idea here.  I need some help with the charts, though.  Are there no stadiums where the sun sets anywhere from left field to first base?  Also, it seems that as the sun is getting low behind the first base line, hitters do exceptionally well.  Is this a correct interpretation?  Could you post a table of sun angle vs. OPS (all sun directions combined)?  Thanks.

Are there no stadiums where the sun sets anywhere from left field to first base?

You don’t want the batter looking into the setting sun and trying to pick up the baseball out of the pitcher’s hand.

Most stadiums are oriented with center field roughly toward the north to east for this reason, though there are some exceptions.

Here’s a nice visualization of the orientation of all the stadiums:

http://www.flipflopflyin.com/flipflopflyball/info-orientation.html

http://www.usno.navy.mil/USNO/astronomical-applications/data-services/alt-az-world

Above is a useful link for this sort of thing. Go to Google Earth and get the lat/long for home plate. Feed that lat/long into the above for sun azimuth/elevation at any minute of any day.