Park Adjusting
Posted: December 30th, 2014, 12:32 am
I was reading over the projection process, and have a few questions. Specifically about how neutral projections are adjusted to a player's home team environment. I see that you point out they are adjusted for his home park, but what about adjusting for home division? Such as, the quality of hitting/pitching that the other team's in the division have, and the types of parks they'll play in on the road. Since we have the schedule already for 2015 we can get an exact idea of every park a player will play in for 2015, and weight it precisely. Maybe if this is looked at on the whole, it is insignificant. It averages out that all road games are generally the same. But are there certain teams where it is significant?
For example, lets think about a pitcher for the Rays. He has a great defense, a great home park, and everything looks peachy. But he also faces four of the highest scoring offenses in the league 19 times per year, and half of those games are in moderate to extreme hitters parks. Boston, Toronto, Baltimore and New York are projected to rank 1st, 2nd, 6th, 9th in Runs/game (average of 4.36) and play in the 2nd, 4th, 5th, and 6th most favourable hitters parks in the league. To me that seems like it's significant. Whereas the Rangers pitchers probably get knocked down a peg based on their home park despite the rest of the teams in their division falling in the friendly side of pitching park factors and don't face the same calibre of offense (4.16 runs/game average).
Now, for all I know these are already factored into the projections in some form or another, but I'm just curious. And obviously factoring in both run scoring and park factors isn't rational as it's double counting the effect of run inflation in a place like Boston. But on the whole, it seems like it matters.
For example, lets think about a pitcher for the Rays. He has a great defense, a great home park, and everything looks peachy. But he also faces four of the highest scoring offenses in the league 19 times per year, and half of those games are in moderate to extreme hitters parks. Boston, Toronto, Baltimore and New York are projected to rank 1st, 2nd, 6th, 9th in Runs/game (average of 4.36) and play in the 2nd, 4th, 5th, and 6th most favourable hitters parks in the league. To me that seems like it's significant. Whereas the Rangers pitchers probably get knocked down a peg based on their home park despite the rest of the teams in their division falling in the friendly side of pitching park factors and don't face the same calibre of offense (4.16 runs/game average).
Now, for all I know these are already factored into the projections in some form or another, but I'm just curious. And obviously factoring in both run scoring and park factors isn't rational as it's double counting the effect of run inflation in a place like Boston. But on the whole, it seems like it matters.