Ballparks – 2035 vs. Today (2042)

[RonCo]

Yesterday, Randy wrote a fun little feature about team-based records, several of which are under siege this season—of particular note to me are records for Total Bases, Slugging, and Runs Scored. Along the way, the topic of ballparks came up and then I had great fun parsing out parks and relating them to how the might affect things. I mean, yeah, we all know they do actually alter results, but no one really can say exactly how much relative to our actual results.

Then Justin and I did our thing on the latest BBA Today, and that was fun, too.

Along the way I got to wondering if I had any old data on what our parks had been in the past … because, yes, this is a changing environment driven by several things that include player ratings, the development engine, the big draft classes, and changes Matt makes to the game settings themselves. In addition, of course to parks. While we don’t know those exact levels, I figured, if I could find data on what our park factors were in the past, I could make direct comparisons of them with the data we have today.

So I went to a bunch of old records and did some scanning and searching, and lo and behold, there something was…an old file with stadium data I had gathered in 2035.

So, let’s take a quick look, and let’s see if we can make a relationship between the offensive stat-bloat that’s gone on in Randy’s data, and ballparks. Have they changed? If so, do those changes match the changes in output, or do they go the other way? Could it be that parks are getting better for pitchers as the offensive numbers go ballistic? That would be interesting, right?

Alas, that is not the case.

Here’s the data: 2035 park factors by division, 2042 park factors by division, and then the delta.

2035	AVG	AVGL	AVGR	2B	3B	HR	HRL	HRR
FL	0.994	0.999	0.991	0.983	0.947	0.992	0.959	1.017
JL	0.999	1.005	0.996	1.020	1.038	1.001	1.029	0.984
AVG	0.996	1.002	0.994	1.002	0.993	0.997	0.994	1.000

2042	AVG	AVGL	AVGR	2B	3B	HR	HRL	HRR
FL	1.017	1.020	1.016	1.010	0.983	0.986	0.963	0.998
JL	1.000	1.007	0.996	1.051	1.073	0.980	0.999	0.970
AVG	1.009	1.014	1.006	1.030	1.028	0.983	0.981	0.984

	AVG	AVGL	AVGR	2B	3B	HR	HRL	HRR
Delta 2042-2035	0.012	0.012	0.012	0.028	0.035	-0.014	-0.013	-0.016

Bottom line, our parks have changed these past seven years to reduce homers, but bump singles, doubles and triples. This fits, to a degree, what we’re seeing. HRs are kind of leveled off lately, but other items are growing. So, yeas, I think it’s fair to say that our ballpark changes have been at least a segment of the cause of the surge.

A couple points to ponder, too.

Parks are clearly not the whole story. Pitcher’s walks are up, for example, and that’s not on the ballparks. Strikeouts, too, are changing, and I don’t think that can go on the parks either…though I suppose it’s -possible-. I note that Matt also posted new league totals we worked on in the off season, and those changes also clearly made a difference (our BABIP is down from .310 to .300, and runs/game are actually down about three-tenths of a run.

Another point here is that the numbers on those tables are merely arithmetic averages of park factors in each league. In 2035 we were playing interleague and different number of games against different teams in and out of both our divisions and leagues. That makes it impossible (or very hard) to calculate the home+away “seasonal” factors each team actually sees throughout a year. With our current schedule, we can do that today, but, of course, without an equal baseline of the past environment there’s nothing else to use as a direct comparison.

Still, I think this is worth thinking about, and I thought it was interesting to confirm that parks have changed in ways that seem at least directionally correlated to the ways our offense has changed over the years.