What makes a ballpark hitter friendly

There are outlier seasons. If you take out , the Average runs ranking becomes 4. Then two things happened. The first was in the team introduced the Humidor. Visually, it seemed to have an effect in shortening up fly balls and reducing HR at Chase.

We can see the HR factor dropped to As I said, there is plenty of fluctuation in these numbers. However through 43 games so far this year, 20 at Chase, 23 on the road , the HR factor has dropped further to So it appears that the reduction in HR could be here to stay.

That number can move quickly mind you, especially this early in the season. But it appears safe to say that relative to the league, Chase field is no longer a HR friendly park. The Runs factor for was also lower than the previous 9 year average, but it could have been an outlier season perhaps, just like The sample size is small.

However look not just at Runs 0. These numbers are all well below previous levels, even Humidor season.

It plays slow. Real slow. Chase Field always had a hard fast infield. However anyone who goes to a lot of games at Chase can see that the new turf plays slower. Players and coaches have mentioned this too. And the data is showing it , emphatically:. This is a big deal. The goal of the team may have been to make Chase Field a neutral ballpark.

And here is one more thing. Remember I mention that Baseball-Reference, Fangraphs, etc all use multi year park factors to calculate their park adjusted metrics. It means those metrics would be overrating the pitching and underrating the hitting. In most ballparks, those tough pitches you battle are foul balls — souvenirs in the stands.

Here, in Oakland, they're outs. It should come as no surprise, then, that Oakland's ERA 3. While Nationals Park grades out as slightly hitter-friendly when it comes to scoring runs, collecting hits and legging out two-baggers, it only ranks in the top 10 in one of those categories—doubles —and just makes the cut as a pitcher-friendly venue over the past two years.

This season, it's not even close—Nationals Park has been one of the more extreme pitcher-friendly parks in baseball. As the season progresses and the weather gets warmer and the air more humid, the park figures to continue to be a place where pitchers enjoy toeing the rubber.

Pay little attention to the team's hitter-friendly TPF in , which has been caused largely by an abnormally high number of triples so far in seven in nine games. As the season wears on, that number figures to fall back in line with its previously established norms. Location matters, as the humid summers and the winds that blow in off of the bay help to keep the ball in the park.

In fact, San Francisco was home to one of only two ballparks the other being Marlins Stadium in Miami that didn't bear witness to at least home runs over the past two seasons.

Yankee Stadium continues to buck its public image as a big-time hitter's park by posting pitcher-friendly numbers for the third consecutive season. Sure, "The House that George Built" is one of the more homer-friendly parks in baseball — thanks in part to a right field porch that's even shorter than advertised it's closer to feet than feet, as printed on the wall — but not even that is enough to overcome the pitcher-friendly grades in four of the other six categories.

There's no way around it: the outfield reconfiguration that Petco Park underwent before the season, with the walls being brought in by approximately 10 feet and lowered by two feet, has resulted in an uptick in home runs, which is exactly what former team president and CEO Tom Garfinkel envisioned. He explained his goals to MLB. This was driven from a baseball standpoint -- in terms of the right way to make it work for players.

Players know what's fair and what's not. Baseball fans want to see the game the way it's intended to be played. When a hitter gets hold of a ball, it should go out. While a reconfigured outfield may have knocked Petco out of the running to be one of the two or three most extreme pitcher's parks in baseball, it hasn't been enough to push it out of the top 10, as the home of the Padres continues to frustrate hitters and help pitchers atone for their mistakes.

So far in , Angel Stadium has been one of baseball's most explosive venues for offense, with no fewer than nine runs being scored in eight of the nine games that it has hosted along with an average of more than three home runs per contest. It's a trend that's unlikely to continue, as the "The Big A" has traditionally favored pitchers. From to , Angel Stadium ranked 15th in runs scored 1, , 16th in slugging percentage.

Enjoy the high-octane offense while you can, for the park is likely to regress back toward its norms the deeper we get into the season. As is the case with some of the other parks on this list, Busch Stadium is a pitcher's park that is playing like a hitter's paradise in Typically one of the more difficult places for a player to pick up an extra-base hit — evidenced by a. With more foul territory available to defenders than you typically find elsewhere, and with the home team boasting one of the more talented pitching staffs in baseball, it won't be long before offense at Busch Stadium falls back in line with its normal numbers.

When the Mets decided to reconfigure Citi Field's outfield dimensions after the season, the goal was to create a ballpark that was fair to both hitters and pitchers, as GM Sandy Alderson explained to MLB.

We didn't want to completely alter the ballpark and make it a proverbial bandbox. That required looking at various dimensions and coming up with something that, based on home run rates and park factors and so forth, was more or less neutral as between pitching and hitting.

What they got was a park that, while more hitter-friendly than it had been since its opening in , still plays as one of the most pitcher-friendly venues in baseball. Over the past two seasons, Citi Field has seen the seventh-fewest runs scored 1, , the 12th-fewest home runs hit and a slugging percentage. It comes as no surprise, then, to see Citi Field's TPF in nearly identical to its mark from the two previous seasons.

Due to an open-air park being next to Lake Erie, balls hit into the air at Progressive Field are often at the mercy of the winds that blow in off of the lake, which can either keep a ball in the field of play or push it well beyond the reach of an outfielder's outstretched glove. Kauffman Stadium is the next toughest park to hit homers in, and it holds a sizable gap over Busch Stadium, suppressing homers by 4. Things get a bit more tightly congested in homer suppression by the remaining teams in the table.

Interestingly, all six ballparks in this table depress homers to left-handed batters. They also represent nine of the ten parks that depress homers for left-handed batters. T-Mobile Park Mariners is the only other park that suppresses homers for lefties with a left-handed batter park factor for homers of 0. All of these parks also reduce dingers compared to a neutral venue for right-handed batters, too.

There are four other parks that depress right-handed homers. SunTrust Park Braves has a right-handed park factor for homers of 0. Josh Shepardson is a featured writer at FantasyPros. For more from Josh, check out his archive and follow him BChad Game Day Live!

View your notifications. Log In. Loading your leagues. Follow FantasyPros. Related Articles.