Quote:
Originally Posted by Syd Thrift
This isn’t how baseball works. First up, the single highest correlation with offense isn’t wall distance or height or some algorithm based on the two but altitude. Period. Coors is one of the biggest stadia in the league and has consistently been by far the most hitter friendly. The stadium the Diamondbacks play in is also big and also allows a ton of homeruns.
Number two is climate, and only once you’ve drilled into climate does the size of the park become a thing. At that, if there’s a prevailing wind it can turn a park that dimension wise ought to have been average into a pitching heaven (see: the Big A). Sometimes the product a wall is built with produces more doubles and so on than the fact that it exists, as was the case with the Green Monster, which went from having a steel framework to being all padded or scoreboard in the 1970s. And then of course there’s the batter’s eye, which is more we’ll maintained now than it used to but which still can vary a bit.
Many times the actual dimensions of a park are the least interesting thing about it in terms of how baseball is played in it.
|
As someone who has watched games at Coors Field since its inception (moved to Denver in the Autumn of 1995, so missed most of first season but made it to Coors for at least one game that year), it is partly the size of the park (or more precisely, the size of the outfield) that makes Coors such a great hitters park. Yes, altitude is the key. But not only because it means the balls fly out of the park much better, but because it is the reason the outfield is vast (to try to mitigate that effect) and as a result Coors yields a great many bloop singles that would be outs in most parks much of the time. It is why outfielders with great range are even more valuable and needed at Coors (and not always a commodity the Rockies are very good at developing or acquiring.) Coors still inflates power numbers, yes, but since the humidor era began it probably even more strongly influences, in a positive direction, batting averages.
While I largely agree with you, Coors Field is a rather extreme example that illustrates that park dimensions can in fact influence offensive production.