from Amazon
Friday, September 17, 2010
Handedness park factors
Dave asks us to look at Safeco based on LHH and RHH:
Those three are driving almost all of the difference in performance of the M’s pitching staff at home versus on the road. Remember how we said that the team had given up 21 more home runs on the road than at home? Ryan Rowland-Smith has given up 14 more away from Safeco by himself – he is 67 percent of the difference in team home run rate.
The Mariners have intentionally loaded up on soft-tossing flyball lefties because Safeco Field is death to right-handed power hitters, and those pitchers can exploit that difference by letting long fly ball outs get tracked down in the left center field gaps.
Know who can’t do that? Right-handed pitchers. It’s actually pretty easy to hit a ball out to right in Seattle, so left-handed hitters have few problems pulling balls over the wall. That’s why RHPs rarely exhibit home/road splits at Safeco that are anything close to what LHPs offer.
Felix’s home/road splits, by the way? His BABIP is four points LOWER on the road, and his HR/PA is 1.39% at Safeco compared to 1.87% on the road. To translate that into actual numbers based on his PAs, if his home and road HR rates were equal, Felix would have given up an additional two home runs in Safeco this year, going all the way from six to eight.
However, because blanket park factors make no attempt to correct for how differently parks play based on the handedness of the player, we’ll now get to see people making claims about Felix benefiting dramatically from the extreme pitcher’s park that he calls home, ignoring the fact that it is not an extreme pitcher’s park on the days that he takes the hill because he is not left-handed.
Obviously, we are not going to cherry pick players to determine what the PF is. But Dave’s point stands that a park that helps a LHP might not help a RHP. And, if a player that is not representative of MLB players has a disproportionate share of the sample, then this will affect the results.
All the reason that you need to increase the sample, and do a better job of adjusting for the characteristics of players, so that you’ve got a representative sample of good/bad pitchers/batters who are LH/RH and GB/FB.
Recent comments
Older comments
Page 1 of 344 pages 1 2 3 > Last »Complete Archive – By Category
Complete Archive – By Date