Thumbing through the The Bill James Handbook 2006
AVG R 2B 3B HR
Comerica Park 102 96 82 176 95
Jacobs Field 96 83 103 46 83
Kauffman Stadium 103 101 116 113 73
Metrodome 98 102 93 85 110
US Cellular 101 104 96 82 139
(In case you aren’t familiar with park factors, it is essentially the ratio of a given stat for a home team and their opponents in the home park, to the same teams on the road. A value of 100 is average. A value above 100 means the park favors the particular stat – like homers at US Cellular)
Comerica Park
For those that spend a great deal of time watching the expansive outfield at Comerica Park, it may come as a surprise that it isn’t the toughest park to score in or even the toughest park to homer. Once again Comerica did reign as triple central. Many of those triples apparently came at the expense of doubles.
Comerica has quite the reputation as a pitchers park, and it is to a small extent. However, since the left field fence was moved in before the 2004 season, it has played at 96 in terms of scoring. Even with the fence closer, it is still tough for right handed hitters to homer with a PF of 85. Lefties tore up right field in 2005 with a home run PF of 118. Looking at the overall effect for 2004 and 2005, the effect was 99. I wonder if moving the bullpens and adding seats somehow contributed?
Jacobs Fields
Jacobs Field was once again a great place for pitchers, and a horrible place for hitters. Doubles were the only offensive event where the hitters had the advantage. Even then, I’m guessing some of those doubles came at the expense of homers as they banged off the mini-monster.
What’s interesting about Comerica and Jacobs is that despite them being pitcher friendly overall, both parks rank high in terms of errors with a PF of 120 for Comerica and 110 for the Jake.
Kauffman Stadium
Kauffman stadium plays relatively neutral, except for power hitters. The park seems to favor gap hitters instead of boppers. It also plays virtually identical for both right handed and left handed hitters.
The Metrodome
The Metrodome, like Kauffman plays basically neutral for most offensive events. It’s home run factor is higher than it’s 3 year average of 102. All of the increase seemed to come from right-handed hitters. The righties accounted for 75 of the 133 home runs hit at home.
US Cellular
The Cell once again proved to be a launching pad with 49 more homers being hit in White Sox home games than in road games. It was a great place to hit left or right, but the PF for lefties was an astounding 163. It also proved the best place to be an infielder with an infield error PF of 66.
interesting table.
perhaps it would be a bit clearer if you presented the statistics in terms of deviation from the 100 mark, so 85 would be -15.
It’s interesting that Comerica Park is not such an extreme park for homerun difficulty. Maybe if Lynn Henning would see this, he might stop writing about the need to bring in the fences further. it’s also interesting that Comerica is only a slightly above average park for batting average. It’s not an extreme park at all except for the triples and that’s good because I love triples.
Lee
Odd to think that a park can suppress both triples and homers (Jacobs Field). I’ve got to think that’s some kind of a fluke. The place has a rep as homer-happy. Has it graded out similarly in the past?
Joe – that effect seems to be a Jake thing. It’s held up reasonably consistently the last couple years.