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Sunday, December 18, 2011
Latos and park factors
Too much is made of matchup stats (i.e., how batter X does against pitcher Y after 20-40 plate appearances, while ignoring each player’s career 2000 plate appearances).
At the same time, is too little made of individual player-park factors? If you have 3000 plate appearances of Barry Bonds at 3Com and away from 3Com (is that what it was called then? I can’t keep up with corporate names), and he hits as many HR at home as he does on the road, do we really care that the average LHH hits two-thirds as many HR at 3Com than away? I say: NO! Barry Bonds has very little in common with those hitters, other than handedness, but (traditional) park factors DEMAND that we treat Bonds as being tightly coupled with that group.
This is Mat Latos’s career Petco / non-Petco slash line (BA, OBP, SLG):
.229 .287 .348
.224 .286 .351
I won’t even bother to tell you which is Petco and which is not, since it’s the same thing! The question is: did he simply have made luck at Petco and good luck away from Petco? Or, is his talent level such that it’s an important parameter when looking at the park factors of the rest of the players? That is, with Bonds, he hits HR so far, that it doesn’t matter that 3Com suppresses HR.
Similarly, is Petco such that Latos can’t benefit from its pitcher-friendliness? I DON’T KNOW. But, these are the kinds of valid questions that are out there.
Latos’ strikeout rate per PA is 23.7% at home and 23.4% on the road. His walk rate is 6.9% at home, 7.9% on the road. His HR rate is the same 2.2% at home and on the road. His BABIP is .283 at home and .276 on the road.
Therefore, we need to do just like we do with handedness splits: personalize them. In The Book, we showed that you take the observed handedness splits and regress them toward the league mean (by adding 1000 PA for LHH and 2200 for RHH, to the number of their PA against LHP). We need to come up with the same thing for parks.
The problem is that you may have to come up with a different regression amount for each park AND for each quality of player. It makes it a tougher job.
So, we can’t presume that Latos was either:
a. completely unaffected by Petco (as evidenced by his splits)
b. extremely unlucky at Petco (as evidenced by all MLB players at Petco)
The truth is somewhere in the middle.
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