You will often hear baseball analysts use the term "Pitcher-Friendly" and "Hitter-Friendly" when referring to certain ballparks. There are many factors that will characterize a ballpark as a pitcher's ballpark or a hitter's ballpark and they are as follows. The higher the fence, the greater the difficulty for a player to hit a home run. While it is only feet from home plate it towers at 36 feet high. Many hits from right-handed hitters will rarely clear the wall.
But in Cincinnati's Great American Ball Park, the right field walls are only eight feet high and some major league walls are even smaller. This is the most obvious factor in determining the difficulty of hitting a home run. How often do you see home runs hit in center field at Minute Maid Park in Houston feet? Not very often. The depth of most MLB stadiums' home run territory will range from to feet depending on location.
It should come as no surprise, then, that Oakland's ERA 3. While Nationals Park grades out as slightly hitter-friendly when it comes to scoring runs, collecting hits and legging out two-baggers, it only ranks in the top 10 in one of those categories—doubles —and just makes the cut as a pitcher-friendly venue over the past two years. This season, it's not even close—Nationals Park has been one of the more extreme pitcher-friendly parks in baseball.
As the season progresses and the weather gets warmer and the air more humid, the park figures to continue to be a place where pitchers enjoy toeing the rubber. Pay little attention to the team's hitter-friendly TPF in , which has been caused largely by an abnormally high number of triples so far in seven in nine games.
As the season wears on, that number figures to fall back in line with its previously established norms. Location matters, as the humid summers and the winds that blow in off of the bay help to keep the ball in the park. In fact, San Francisco was home to one of only two ballparks the other being Marlins Stadium in Miami that didn't bear witness to at least home runs over the past two seasons. Yankee Stadium continues to buck its public image as a big-time hitter's park by posting pitcher-friendly numbers for the third consecutive season.
Sure, "The House that George Built" is one of the more homer-friendly parks in baseball — thanks in part to a right field porch that's even shorter than advertised it's closer to feet than feet, as printed on the wall — but not even that is enough to overcome the pitcher-friendly grades in four of the other six categories.
There's no way around it: the outfield reconfiguration that Petco Park underwent before the season, with the walls being brought in by approximately 10 feet and lowered by two feet, has resulted in an uptick in home runs, which is exactly what former team president and CEO Tom Garfinkel envisioned.
He explained his goals to MLB. This was driven from a baseball standpoint -- in terms of the right way to make it work for players. Players know what's fair and what's not. Baseball fans want to see the game the way it's intended to be played.
When a hitter gets hold of a ball, it should go out. While a reconfigured outfield may have knocked Petco out of the running to be one of the two or three most extreme pitcher's parks in baseball, it hasn't been enough to push it out of the top 10, as the home of the Padres continues to frustrate hitters and help pitchers atone for their mistakes.
So far in , Angel Stadium has been one of baseball's most explosive venues for offense, with no fewer than nine runs being scored in eight of the nine games that it has hosted along with an average of more than three home runs per contest.
It's a trend that's unlikely to continue, as the "The Big A" has traditionally favored pitchers. From to , Angel Stadium ranked 15th in runs scored 1, , 16th in slugging percentage. Enjoy the high-octane offense while you can, for the park is likely to regress back toward its norms the deeper we get into the season. As is the case with some of the other parks on this list, Busch Stadium is a pitcher's park that is playing like a hitter's paradise in Typically one of the more difficult places for a player to pick up an extra-base hit — evidenced by a.
With more foul territory available to defenders than you typically find elsewhere, and with the home team boasting one of the more talented pitching staffs in baseball, it won't be long before offense at Busch Stadium falls back in line with its normal numbers. When the Mets decided to reconfigure Citi Field's outfield dimensions after the season, the goal was to create a ballpark that was fair to both hitters and pitchers, as GM Sandy Alderson explained to MLB.
While symmetrically designed, Kauffman Stadium's expansive power alleys may limit home runs, but they lend themselves to an increase in other extra-base hits, more than making up for the lack of long balls that we normally find in a hitter's park. With one of baseball's premier defensive outfields in , the Royals may be able to get to more balls hit in the gaps than they did in the past.
However, as the season progresses, the offensive output will increase, drawing closer to its previously established levels. With flatter angles in the outfield from center field to the corners that lead to a larger swath of grass for outfielders to cover, it's no surprise that Chase Field is a breeding ground for extra-base hits. The dry, thin desert air in Phoenix doesn't hinder power hitters in their efforts to put the ball on the other side of the outfield walls, regardless of whether the roof is open.
While offense at Chase Field has been down so far in , that will pick up as the season progresses, once again putting the home of the Arizona Diamondbacks near the top of the list when it comes to hitter-friendly venues in baseball. While Cincinnati may boast a losing record at home this season , don't look at Great American Ball Park as a reason why offense is down at baseball's premier destination for home-run hitters.
Instead, look at the pitching—both by the Reds and by the two teams that have paid them a visit, the St. Louis Cardinals and Tampa Bay Rays—as the primary culprit behind the decrease, nearly across the board, in offensive production at the bandbox known as GAB. As lesser pitching staffs make their way into Cincinnati, those park factors will normalize thanks to the deep, powerful lineup that the home team boasts.
With the shortest corners in baseball— feet to the foot-tall Green Monster in left field, feet to Pesky's Pole in right—baseball's oldest stadium, Fenway Park, which opened in , has been one of the game's most hitter-friendly stadiums for nearly as long. Sure, the Green Monster turns fly balls to left field into singles—if an outfielder knows how to play the ball off the wall—but the park's oddly designed outfield, with deep power alleys and walls of various heights, lends itself to routinely high amounts of doubles and triples being hit there.
Once hailed as a pitcher-friendly park, things changed more than a decade ago when the Tigers decided to cut down the original field dimensions, most notably reducing the distance from home plate to the fence in left-center field by 25 feet, from feet to feet. Right-handed sluggers, like Miguel Cabrera, have taken advantage of that redesign, with the two-time defending AL MVP smacking nearly 32 percent of his career home runs at Comerica. A deep center field lends itself to an increase in doubles and triples, as balls that land in the outfield gaps will bounce and roll—and continue to roll—as the hitter rounds the bases.
While doubles are down and triples are up this season, those two categories will even themselves out as the season progresses, as Comerica remains one of the premier destinations for hitters looking for an edge.
Despite playing like an extreme pitcher's park in and having deep corners, only the ballpark at No. As is the case in Cincinnati, both the performances by the home team's pitching staff 1. While we may not see quite as many home runs as we have in the past due to Milwaukee's improved rotation and bullpen, the offense is coming—and by season's end, Miller Park's park factors will more closely resemble those that we've become accustomed to.
Humidors or no humidors, Coors Field has been—and will continue to be—the most extreme hitter-friendly park in baseball due to its high altitude. It's something the team has embraced, as noted on the Rockies' official website :. But the ball still travels 9 percent farther at 5, feet than at sea level. On the whole, playing in a hitters park adds stress and wear and tear to the staff. Posting a 3. Doing the same in Arlington, Texas is much much easier. So being able to contextualize player performance is vital to the evaluation process.
But we all form opinions on players, at least in part, based on how we perceive their performance through their Statistics.
So how do we better understand how to go about this? We can see this by looking at a couple of resources that measure park factors and then create metrics that take those park factors into account. Most who read the pages of AZSnakepit are at least somewhat familiar with these. But there is usually a pretty big gap between those parks and Coors. Although Arlington sometimes actually pips Coors. There is just too much fluctuation from one season to the next not to do so, but over a longer period of time, the true nature of a ballpark begins to emerge.
Note, I used the decimal point, so 1. The basic formula takes DBacks hitters home and road, and measures against Opponents numbers in Chase field and in DBacks road games. The Formula looks like this:. It inflated homers and hits, and especially double and triples. The HR park factor of is fairly consistent. There are outlier seasons. If you take out , the Average runs ranking becomes 4.
Then two things happened.
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