For you stats guys (and you know who you are wink ), rankings of which ballparks are more hitter/pitcher friendly.

Top 5 hitter-friendly are:

Colorado
Arizona
Texas
Montreal
Houston

Top 5 pitcher-friendly are:

LA
Seattle
San Francisco
Detroit
Oakland

I notice the Royals are moving their fences back in 2004. I always thought that the power alleys were huge there (385, I think) and it was always considered a "pitchers" park.

I was a little preturbed by where the rated Camden Yards: Neutral. In fact, bordering on being a pitcher's park. That ridiculously short 364 feet-from-home-plate left center field power alley? Puhleeze!

I'd consider Camden Yards to be a hitter's playground more than a pitcher's destination of choice.

Outside of some obvious places like Coors, doesn't a park's hitter- or pitcher-friendlieness depend on the quality of the home team's hitters and pitchers? If the home team's pitching sucks, they're going to give up lots of runs so that would cause the hitting stats to be higher. Or if they have good pitching and lousy hitting, lots of low-scoring games would cause it to be considered pitcher-friendly.

Wrigley Field: if the wind blows in, pitcher-friendly. If the wind blows out, hitter-friendly.

One of the factors that's kind of odd in the two parks here in Los Angeles is, like Wrigley, climate related. Los Angeles (for the sake of this argument, I'll include Anaheim in Orange County in to this, though they'd hate being lumped in with the dreaded El Lay) can be very damp in the evenings during the spring and fall, thus having a deadening effect on the ball. The stats geeks should take that in to consideration.

A quick primer on Park Adjustments (Baseball-Reference.com)


There are a number of different sources for park adjustments (I think it's the STATS organization that calls them Park Factors), so I don't know the reputation of the one linked by Canmark. But Joe, the formulas used are designed to neutralize the quality of the home / away teams' players (to the MLB norm, I assume).

Short fences -- especially down one outfield line -- do not always mean a hitters' paradise (hence, Pac Bell). Camden Yards has consistently "played" as a pitcher's park, I think.

Jim (putting aside the rote "geek" dis), the "park adjusters" do consider the climate factors ... it's part of the stadium's final number. If you mean "ignore" the evening damp of LA, what would the point of that be? It's part of the season-long environment of that park. These numbers are generally used to determine what a player's year would look like in a neutral setting, not to predict 81 incidences of dry-condition games...

I know because of the relatively small sample of one season, some prefer to use a Park Factor compiled over at least a 3-year span.

I suspect one of the big reasons Wrigley no longer shows up as a hitters park, after being by far the best hitters park through the '80's, is the switch to night baseball. I expect the wind tends to switch direction after sunset.

Dodger stadium has always been a pitchers park. Anaheim's pattern is kind of funny--I don't know if it's changes in weather patterns or if they've been playing with the hitting background or fences or what. It was pretty neutral from '97 to 2000, but in 2001, it was a hitters park, but has been more of a pitchers park from 2002-2003. Just random fluctuations due to small sample size, or something else? Any ideas, Jim?

By the way, I think one area some of the stat geeks definitely need an education in is statistical significance--people generally attach way too much significance to small samples.

Well, some would be the operative word there. Most sabermetricians whose work I read use "small sample size!" as a battle cry, especially against TV nitwits who make silly claims about "clutch" performance, based on as few as three or four games...