You leave off he won 16 games, against the weakest opponents they could arrange. Even the Tigers whose hitting dropped off badly this year, managed to go a couple series against KC without facing him. I would toss him in a pile with the top 5. I would not feel badly if he won, but he would not be my choice. His era was under a deuce for quite a while , but it just wound up as a very good one, not auspicious. The other contenders faced teams in a pennant race that desperately wanted to win. They faced the best the game had to offer, in the most pressure packed games you could play in. Grienke mysteriously started the next series.
You have now made this claim* on this board on two separate ocassions. You were proven wrong, conclusively, the first time. Until you back up this ridiculous statement, could you stop bringing untruths fabricated out of whole cloth into these discussions?
*The claim being, specifically, that the Royals made efforts to adjust the rotation throughout the season so Grienke could avoid a “big game”.
I think it is illustrative of just how underrated Chase Utley is when he isn’t even on this ballot (he’s a much more valuable ballplayer than teammate Howard and Ryan “Would be DHing if the Brew Crew were still in the AL” Braun). I almost wish I could change my vote to tell you the truth, but Pujols is still the best and Hanley did have a better year than Utley.
It has been conclusively proven to you, with objective evidence, that the Royals did not “arrange” for Greinke to face weaker opponents than his rotation spot would dictate. It’s dishonest to continue saying something you know to be false.
How is this unusual? The Royals and Tigers played six 3-game series this year, once in April, May, July and August, and twice in September. Greinke pitched in four of those six series; April, May, July, and the second September series. That is exactly what one would expect if Greinke just kept making his start when it was his turn. You would expect, give a 5-man rotation with off days, that the Tigers would miss Greinke twice. The Royals would have had to manipulate their rotation for Greinke to NOT miss the Tigers twice.
You sound like Dilbert’s pointy-haired boss complaining that 40% of all sick days are taken on Mondays and Fridays.
Maybe you could explain this Park Factor now, since I have no clue what you’re talking about.
Sure. MLB on ESPN - Scores, Stats and Highlights
Yes - the Royals give up a bunch of runs, and thus, a bunch of runs get scored at Kaufman Stadium. But they also give up a bunch of runs on the road. By comparing those two numbers, you get a good feel for how much the park is contributing as opposed to the crappy pitchers/defense.
For instance, using the Royals, here are some basic pitching stats, which show quite a bit of disparity between home and away:
Batting Average Against
Home: .280
Away: .256
On Base Percentage Against:
Home: .348
Away: .338
Batting Average for Balls in Play (BABIP):
Home: .328
Away: .289
And in comparison, here are the Yankees, which don’t display much difference at all:
Batting Average Against
Home: .249
Away: .253
On Base Percentage Against:
Home: .325
Away: .329
Batting Average for Balls in Play (BABIP):
Home: .287
Away: .297
Park Factor is just a way of expressing how a ballpark affects the balance between offense and defense. If a team and their opponents tend to score 5% fewer runs in Home Team Ballpark than they do in the team’s’ away games, Home Team Ballpark has a “park factor” of 95. (100 is a dead average park.) Since it’s weighed by the home team’s own performance, whether they’re good or they suck doesn’t really factor much into it.
That said, no major league ballpark affects offense as much as people tend to think. Coors Field used to but I guess that humidor works. Five or six percent is about as extreme as it usually gets, though Arizona seems to consistently jack up offense by 7-8 percent. Oakland is consistently down 5-7 percent. That’s consistent with what you would expect; Oakland is at sea level and has about twenty square miles of foul ground, while Arizona has short lines, a better hitting background, is warmer, and is at higher elevation, all things that help batters.
Okay, but a single season’s numbers alone don’t mean anything. Kauffman Stadium ranked 2nd in hits this season, but 17th last season. Why is that? Did the Royals’ pitching and defense get worse? Did their bats get better?
Last year old Yankee stadium ranked 12th in runs; this year new Yankee stadium ranked 20th. What accounts for that? The new stadium was tops in home runs, so it seems to be easier to hit it out there. But the Yankees also signed CC and AJ to occupy the top of the rotation, and they both had solid years, so the Yankees’ staff is clearly better this season than it was last season. You can’t claim that the new Yankees stadium is a pitchers’ park based on one season of stats when the Yankees had one of the top pitching staffs in the league.
How about the fact that Kansas City spent $250 million updating and dramatically changing the entire stadium?
It being a new park with different features?
Sure you can, simply because the Yankees pitching staff only pitches half of the innings during a game. During the other half, the opposing pitchers have to pitch to the ridiculously dominating Yankees lineup, and yet the numbers still come in on the pitchers side of the equation.
Listen - Park Factor doesn’t adjust the numbers very much. We’re not talking about a 2 or 3 run difference. We’re not even talking about a 1 run difference. We’re talking about half a run per game difference between Coors Field and Petco Park. But when you make a claim that Sabathia was facing an uphill battle because he was in a hitter’s park when the numbers show differently, that claim is wrong.
Their pitching/defense was quite a lot worse in 2009, yes.
Park effects aren’t totally consistent from year to year due to random chance, but generally speaking they’re pretty steady as long as the park doesn’t change or there aren’t a lot of new parks.
I don’t think you yet quite grasp the concept. How good the Yankees are doesn’t have anything to do with it. Park effect is the comparison of how many runs the team scores and allows relative to its road games. How many total runs were scored in the park isn’t meaningful; what matters is how many were scored in the park relative to how many the team scored and allowed on the road. That’s what tells you whether New Yankee Stadium helped Sabathia and Burnett or whether it helped Mark Teixiera.
As it happens, in 2008 and 2009 both Yankee Stadiums were rated as above average hitter’s parks (I don’t know where Munch is getting his info, but baseballreference gives New Yankee a 103 park effect) though prior to 2008 Yankee Stadium was generally a pitcher’s park; 2008 was probably a fluke. The team scored many more runs in 2009 than it had in 2008, and allowed a few more too, but that has no effect on park factor. In both years they scored and allowed about three percent more runs at home than on the road.
ESPN. I linked to it above. But I like b-r.com better - it looks like they factor out interleague games (which takes out any differences in DH), and it uses runs/27 outs (since the home team doesn’t have to bat every 9th inning). Does b-r.com have a ranking? I can’t find it outside of the individual teams’ pages.
I understand the concept (I think :o). In games in which the Yankees were involved, less runs were scored overall at Yankee Stadium than were scored away from Yankee Stadium, but the difference in runs wasn’t that great. The difference in home runs, however, was great. If you played in Yankee Stadium you had to deal with the long ball.
What does it all mean? Beats me. All I’m saying is that you can’t necessarily conclude that the Yankees’ new stadium wasn’t difficult to pitch in just based on park factor. The Indians had the worst road ERA in baseball, yet had a better offense on the road. What’s up with that? Lack of home field advantage? Who knows. I consider Progressive Field to be a hitters’ park. Sure didn’t seem like it this year.
It would be hilarious if it turned out to be directly attributable to the seagulls mentioned in the wiki article.
Fields undergo a lot more tweaking year to year these days. Any chance the walls were brought in or out? Bullpens moved from the foul ball area to behind the outfield wall? The standard wiki article doesn’t mention historical dimensions for parks, and ballparks.com is pretty terrible on data.
Well, you can’t really conclude anything about the park based on one season, unless the effect was amazingly extreme, as was the case with Mile High Stadium in 1993.
The point isn’t that its harder to pitch, but that it should affect how you view a player’s statistics. A 3.50 ERA put up in Safeco doesn’t have the same value to helping your team win as does a 3.50 ERA in Coors Field.
To my admitted surprise, Jacobs/Progressibve has never consistently been a hitter’s park. It’s shown a lot of year to year variation - I don’t know why but I’d guess weather - but overall hasn’t been a terrific place to hit. It just got that reputation in the 1990s when the Indians had a bunch of guys who could rake it.
Again, though, it’s worth noting that the impact of park effects is often exagerrated by folks trying to make a case for someone to win or not win an award. Most parks are close enough to being neutral to not matter a great deal in analyzing player value. There are a few exceptions, like pre-humidor Coors, which REALLY warped statistics; in 1999, when Pedro Astacio put up a 5.04 ERA for rhe Rockies, he actually had a terrific year, was probably one of the 15 best starting pitchers in the NL. The park with the biggest effect now is probably Petco Park in San Diego, which murders hitters; it reduces runs by at least ten percent.
If the difference between Zack Greinke and King Felix is as small as the park effect, either guy would be a defensible choice for he Cy Young Award.
If Cleveland’s weather has been similar to most of the rest of the Midwest this year has been one of the coldest summers on record. Probably played a big role.
Congrats to Ataraxy and John DiFool for correctly predicting both AL and NL Rookies of the Year (Andrew Bailey and Chris Coghlan).
Congrats to Rick Porcello for coming out of the “other” field to win the Rookie Of the Year Award in the AL.
Wait, what?
Yep. That’s right. You heard it here first. In my head, he won. So there.
I was voting based purely on whom >I< thought deserved it-was I instead supposed to vote in anticipation of what the mediots would do? In any case looks like they got 2 of them right for a change (or at least didn’t make any egregrious errors-yet).