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Monday, April 20, 2009
Home field advantage… or road disadvantage?
We’ve discussed many times regarding the Rox hangover effect. As Sky notes here:
However, it does seem as though a player playing in an extremely unusual ballpark could develop bad habits that would carry over to his road games, giving him a road disadvantage. For instance, playing one’s home games in the LA Coliseum could cause players to get into the habit of popping up balls down the line for cheap homers - a habit that would cause him great harm in most normal parks. How much players can control their habits depending on their surroundings is unknown, but this could be a reason why an odd home park could cause a road disadvantage.
MGL has produced alot of data on the Rox hitters over the years that seems to back the “bad habit” assertion. Not necessarily bad habit.... it could be familiarity, or the baseball equivalent of flying’s “jet lag” or what have you. That when players leave the Rockies, their road stats (overall) improve. All the more reason to be interested in Matt Holliday this year. Indeed, Sky’s data also points to this as he shows a 19 point drop in road performance for 41 players, while playing for the Rox compared to when they are on the road for another team.
For whatever reason, he concludes:
After reviewing all of the evidence and arguments here, I’m still inclined to say that teams with quirky home parks are helped overall by their park and I would highly doubt that teams are actually hurt overall by having a quirky park.
For someone who did alot of work, this conclusion simply doesn’t follow. Why is he “inclined” to say that? He seems to have started with both the question and the answer. His data leads one way, and yet he still discards the results. I also don’t think he needs to necessarily look at the parks as a group. If the reason for the park impact of Colorado is the elevation, then this has nothing to do with the Astrodome. If we look specifically at Coors, I see no reason to reject our current position that there’s a Rox hangover effect.
Whether the hangover effect changes based on how many years you’ve been playing there, or how good a hitter you are, or whether it’s at the start or end of the homestand / road trip, that’s to be determined. (And I think someone did look at least at one of these.) But I would ignore Sky’s last paragraph in his article, and let his work stand strong on its own.
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