Batting .400 and hitter's parks. Are records at Coors Field legit?

Factual Questions
1

Around the middle of the past season there was a lot of hot gas emitted by the nation’s sportswriters regarding Todd Helton’s flirtation with a .400 batting average. One guy I read actually suggested (I hope facetiously) that if Helton finished above the mark, the record should bear an asterisk because of the “unfair” advantage of playing half his games in the thin air of Colorado.

OK, batting stats may be inflated at Coors Field because the ball travels farther where the air is thinner. But after a little investigation, it appears to me that many, even most, of the previous .400 seasons owed a lot to park advantage.

For simplicity, let’s just restrict this to post-1900. Since 1900, 8 different players have hit over .400 on 13 occasions. However, this has been accomplished at only 7 ballparks. And just two parks, Detroit’s Tiger Stadium and St. Louis’ Sportsman’s Park, account for 8 of the 13 seasons! Ty Cobb hit .400+ three times, once at Detroit’s Municipal Stadium, and twice at Tiger Stadium. Harry Heilman did it once, at Tiger Stadium. Rogers Hornsby did it three times for the Cardinals and George Sisler twice for the Browns, but both teams played home games at Sportsman’s Park. Of the remaining 4, Nap Lajoie played in Baker Bowl in Philly, Bill Terry at the Polo Grounds in NY, Ted Williams at Fenway, and Shoeless Joe Jackson at Cleveland’s League Park. I have seen all of these referred to in print as hitter’s parks, except for League Park (and I haven’t found a statement one way or the other about that one, although a 290’ dimension in right field is pretty suggestive).

I find the case of Sportsman’s Park particularly interesting. Five out of thirteen .400 seasons (38%) were set at the same park within a span of only 6 years (1920-1925), by two different players in different leagues. I have trouble believing this was just a coincidence, but the published dimensions for Sportsman’s Park don’t suggest it was far enough out of line from contemporary parks to account for this. Is anyone aware of any particular oddity about Sportsman’s Park in the 1920s?

Of course several of these guys, notably Cobb, Sisler and Hornsby, batted .420 or better, and would undoubtedly have hit .400 on the Dead Sea or at Dodger Stadium. But I suspect that if one took the park factor into account a majority of the .400 seasons on record would be at least as suspect as one at Coors Field.

I imagine that some statistician somewhere has looked at the question at least for Williams. Would Williams have batted .406 in 1941 if he had played his home games somewhere other than Fenway? What was the difference between his home average and his road average in 1941? (Of course, Williams was a great hitter under any circumstances, and I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that his road average was phenomenally high too.)

Has anyone seen an article or analysis on this subject? Despite any potential advantage at Coors Field, it seems to me a record set there is no less valid than a lot of previous records. (And of course I realize that .400 is just an arbitrary cut-off. Really the heart of my question is whether the park factor at Coors is significantly out of line with those at other parks, including historical ones.)

PS. In Palmer and Thorn’s The Hidden Game of Baseball they did calculate historical “park factors” for both hitters and pitchers. However, as they calculated these on a year-by-year basis, the factors jump around all over the place. Obviously the park factor should be pretty much the same as long as the dimensions (or the elevation) don’t change, so these factors have to be calculated over a significant period of time. Has anybody done a better job of this since Palmer and Thorn?

2

Since the early day of baseball when managers kept the grass really long in the infield to give their speedy team an advantage, home fields were made with built-in advantages for the home teams.

Look at Yankee Stadium. If had a short right field porch (it was barely longer than 300 feet before it was renovated in the '70s, and now it’s still only 314 feet). This was built because of Babe Ruth’s power. Is his record any less valid because a majority of his games were in a field custom-built (literally) for his talents?

Any right-handed pull hitter with even a modicum of power will do much better in Fenway Park with it’s short (but tall) Green Monster to hit pop flys over, but they wouldn’t do shit when the balls died as 400+ foot outs in Death Valley in Yankee Stadium.

The beautiful thing about baseball is that everything isn’t uniform, that things can change. A home run is an out in one park, that is if th wind is blowing out instead of in, right? Kinda like life.

Okay - I’m treading into some dangerous Bob Costas territory here! But to answer your question, as long as the park is a major leage park, the records will be considered the same except for the number crunching purists who have to show the world how Honus Wagner would have done against Goose Gossage.

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Satan

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3

The park factor is meaningless. .400 is .400 and the ballparks have little to do with it. Further, prior to 1920, the park factor wasn’t all that important: in the dead ball era, it didn’t matter how far the fences were from home plate. No one was going to reach them (even in Fenway Park).

Now you can argue that some years the .400 was cheapened by a juiced ball (Bill Terry’s .401 in 1930 is an example of this). However, Terry’s .401 is considered legitimate, so any other will be.

And while we’re on batting averages, here’s some interesting trivia – name the batter who officially led the American League in batting average, but who was denied the batting title. This isn’t a trick – the rules said he was the batting champion, but he was never recognized as such, and it wasn’t because he broke any rule, law, or regulation.

4

Taffy Wright lost a batting title even though he qualified. He just barely played in enough games and didn’t have a lot of at bats. However, he wasn’t Ted Williams so he got booted off.
Bobby Avila also was credited with a winning bat title, even though subsequent reviews of the records showed that Williams had a higher average in that year. However, Avila is still considered to be the batting champion.
Sorry, I don’t have the years for these off the top of my head.

Another thing to remember about Williams’ .406 in 1941 is that in that year, there were no sacrifice flies and Williams picked up several at bats that he wouldn’t today.

5

Was it Jackie Robinson, because he was black?

6

League Park in Cleveland was a bandbox, too.

You’re basically right - all records are usually set when the conditions are optimum for them to be set. The park factor is just one - you could add live-vs.-dead balls, use of relief pitchers in the modern game, the size of the strike zone, the advent of the slider, the use of the DH, Astroturf, etc.

That doesn’t invalidate any record, but they have to be appreciated in the context of how the game was played at the time. It’s no use pretending baseball is some precious, timeless, unchanging jewel, despite the yammering of so many pretentious writers. It has kept changing and will keep changing. What doesn’t?

7

Yup, Taffy Wright in 1938. He batted .350 after appearing in 100 games (the qualification for a batting title back then). However, he had only around 250 at bats (he was primarily a late-inning defensive replacement). Baseball determined that wasn’t enough, so the title went to Jimmy Foxx. A few years later, they changed the qualifications to a certain minimum number of at bats.

The Williams incident was just the opposite. Williams failed to qualify because he didn’t have enough ABs. Ted led the league in walks that year, which cut down on his ABs so much so that he was a little under the minimum. The result led to baseball making another change and adopting a “plate appearances” standard for batting championships. Williams wins ex post facto, but under the rules in force at the time, he didn’t qualify and Avila was the champion.

8

Yes, I personally agree that a record is a record at any MLB park, regardless of local peculiarities. I’m not really asking if the records are legit, but what the magnitude of the park factor is.

What I really want to know is, has anyone seen a legitimate published analysis of how large the park factor is for particular parks? Is it worth 10? 20? 30? points or more on a batting average for particular players? And has anyone made an attempt to actually calculate what the park factor is at Coors?

Lets leave out factors like live vs. dead ball, relief pitching, etc. I’m familiar with the arguments why the .400 average is as dead as the 5-cent cigar. I don’t care why there were so many .400+ seasons in the 1920s, but why there were so many at Sportsman’s Park.

I recall seeing some analysis, maybe in Palmer and Thorn, of how the records of DiMaggio and Williams might have been affected had they played for each other’s teams (because of the opposite righty-lefty advantages at Yankee Stadium vs. Fenway). IIRC, DiMaggio would have had a much better record if he had played at Fenway, while, perhaps surprisingly, the switch wouldn’t have made much difference to Williams.

9

Try the Society for American Baseball Research (a serious bunch of number crunchers) at http://www.sabr.org .
I’m sure the “park factor” has been addressed by somebody there.

10

In the NHL there were some rinks that were smaller than regulation size until the new arenas were built. The Boston Garden rink was one of the smaller ones. So it is not unique to baseball.

11

Rogers Hornsby and George Sisler played there.

It has little to do with the park and everything to do with the ballplayer.

12

Do you have a cite for this? I posted a thread asking about this, but nobody could help me…

Yer pal,
Satan

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13

As a matter of fact, they almost did switch ballparks. The Yankees and Red Sox agreed in principle to the swap, but the Boston GM got cold feet overnight and asked the Yankees to throw in a young catcher named Yogi Berra. The Yankees refused and the deal collapsed.

14

Hornsby was right-handed and Sisler was left-handed, so you can’t use the configuration of the park as an excuse. Sportsman’s Park was shorter to RF than LF.

Hornsby was simply a great hitter and Sisler had high batting averages, but drew few walks and had only average power.

Park effects are very important. If you get a copy of Total Baseball, you can find out what the park effect for a particular park was for each year.

15

This site mentions that the rink size in the Gahden’s replacement the Fleet Arena is 200x85 feet. (Standard NHL rink size) and that the size in the Boston Garden was 191X83 feet. I was unable to find any facts about basketball, but I seem to remember hearing the tale that the Boston Garden parquet (Margarine!) was also under standard NBA court size. It does make me wonder, why didn’t the NBA/NHL force the team to change?

pat

16

Though Yankee Stadium WAS built with Babe Ruth in mind, the Bambino actually hit most of his home runs on the road! Go figure.

The guy who benefitted MOST from his home stadium was Mel Ott- 323 of his 511 homers were hit at the Polo Grounds.

17

The current issue of “ESPN:The Magazine” which has Steve Francis of the Houston Rockets and three babes on the cover, has an article about how bad the Chicago Blackhawks have become, which states in part that the rink at old Chicago Stadium was much smaller than normal.

18

You’re right about the rink size at the Gahden, but it’s hard to see how that really affected scoring. It did mean many generations of Bruins teams with muckers who were good at slamming opponents into the boards, so fancy skaters like Gretzky were at a small disadvantage.

Give the architects a break, though - the place was really made for boxing, with hockey and basketball being afterthoughts. They even held a BC-Notre Dame FOOTBALL game inside once, in the '30’s (and you thought Arena Football was new?).

The basketball court was always regulation-size, though. The only quirks were the gaps between the pallets, and the legendary “dead spots” where Celtic defenders were thought to have steered opposing players so they could steal off the dribble.

The parquet floor was moved to the Fleece Center intact, and is being replaced section by section (wanna buy a piece?).

19

ElvisL.1ves, thanks for the point to the SABR site. However, there doesn’t seem to be any way to search it short of going through the table of contents of each Baseball Research Journal one by one (and there’s quite a few). I was hoping there might have been some sabremetrician on-line who had actually read an article, or know something about this, and could give me a cite.

BobT, I really will have to upgrade to Total Baseball the next time I get to the States (I live overseas). But as I mentioned with regard to Palmer and Thorn’s book, park factor can’t really be calculated on the basis of a single year. Unless park dimensions change, it should stay the same (at least proportionately to league average) for decades. (Of course once you get into multiple decades, you begin to have to make those dicey inter-era comparisons).

With regard to RealityChuck’s, comments about Hornsby and Sisler, they’re off base. :wink: They both played in other parks (Hornsby in at least 4 including Wrigley and the Polo Grounds) and neither hit .400 anywhere but Sportsman’s Park.

The fact that one was a lefty and the other right doesn’t necesarily negate the importance of park factor for either of them in Sportsman’s Park. The factor doesn’t depend just on the distance to the fences but also on their height and the amount of foul ground. It’s far from just a matter of hitting homers. Fenway may favor right-handers more than lefties, but I believe it actually favors all hitters. It’s quite possible that Sportman’s could have been favorable for both Sisler and Hornsby, even if if favored one more than the other.

It may in fact be just a coincidence that two exceptional hitters happened to play at the same park in an era conducive to hitting. However, I thought the coincidence was sufficiently odd to be worth pointing out.

At this point it doesn’t seem like anyone has actually seen anything specific on the question, and the thread seems to be drifting off into other sports, so I’ll drop it. I’d still be interested to learn how the park factor at Coors compares to that at Fenway, say.

One other factor that is rarely mentioned for Coors is that opposing teams may be slightly disadvantaged because they are not acclimated to the altitude, while Rockies players are. However, as there is little sustained activity in baseball this is unlikely to be a big factor. I do recall reading about this sort of thing to account for why the Denver Broncos always lost the Superbowl (until recently). Playing home games at Mile-High gave them an advantage in winning the division and the playoffs because opponents were unacclimated to the thinner air. This advantage disappeared in the Superbowl, played at sea level. However, if this sort of thing were really important one would expect for it to show up in basketball in particular.

Another point to ponder: Maybe this has been addressed on some other thread, but if all baseball parks are different (making it possible to tailor a team to a particular configuration) while all basketball courts are the same (except for Boston Garden of course), why is the home winning percentage for baseball (~55%) so much lower than for basketball (~70%)? (Football and hockey are intermediate.)

20

I recently had a chance to consult Total Baseball, thanks to BobT’s point. So I now have the opportunity of answering my own question, at least in part.

Total Baseball, by Palmer and Thorn, much improves on the authors’ previous methods of calculating park factor from The Hidden Game of Baseball, in particular because they calculate it over a span of years, not simply year-by-year. One of the figures they give is the run ratio at each park, with 100 being average, and higher figures indicating better parks for hitters. (Of course, this is not exactly the same as batting average, but it should be pretty well correlated.) Total Baseball also gives home/road stats for many (but not all) leading players, including Hornsby, Willams, Cobb and Lajoie.

Sportsman’s Park during the 1920’s in fact was one of the most hitter-friendly parks on record, with a run factor of 112 in the AL and 106 for the NL. And Hornsby’s home/road performances for two of the years he hit .400 were wildly disproportiate: 1924, .469 home/.332 road (total .424); 1925, .478/.370 (.403). He clearly would not have hit over .400 if he had played home games at another park. Ironically though, in 1922 he hit over .400 both at home and on the road (.403/.405, total .401) so this is the only year that park factor didn’t seem to have much effect for him.

Total Baseball doesn’t give the home/away record of Sisler, but given the fact that park factor was even more pronounced in AL games at Sportsman’s, its hard to imagine he might not have benefited as much or more than Hornsby.

Fenway in the 40’s had an even bigger park factor: 114. Williams batted .428 home vs .380 road in 1941, and would not have batted .406 if he had played elsewhere.

Cobb is the real anomaly. Although both Municipal Stadium (107) and Tiger Stadium (102) were hitters’parks, Cobb batted over .400 both home and away in 1911 (.418/.422, total .420) and 1912 (.404/.418, total .410). In 1922 he went .405/.397. Nap Lajoie also batted over .400 home and away in 1901 (.425/.433, total .426).

Palmer and Thorn don’t give home and away records for the others, but Jackson (107) and Heilman (102) were probably helped by friendly parks as well. The only player to hit over .400 at park that was below average for hitters was Bill Terry, who batted at .401 at the Polo Grounds (97) in 1930; but then that was a year of wildly inflated batting averages anyway.

I think it’s pretty safe to say that most .400 averages since 1900 have owed quite a bit to park advantage (Cobb excepted). One reason no one has hit .400 since Williams is that George Brett and Rod Carew didn’t happen to play at Fenway.