It’s no secret that analytics has had a greater impact on baseball than most, if not all other major sports. A leading reason for this is that the fundamental building block of any baseball event, a pitch, is a relatively isolated event. Sure, there are eight other players on the field, but it’s primarily a 1 vs. 1 interaction between a batter and a pitcher. Analysts covering other sports aren’t so lucky; basketball, football, soccer, and hockey all have an entire defensive staff that’s able to adjust its coverage of a player, and several teammates whose activity can have a positive or negative influence on a player’s output in hard-to-measure ways. The relative lack of outside factors influencing a pitching event, paired with the large sample size created by a long season, means that we can typically understand a player or team’s skill with a high degree of confidence.
Love the article! From your description of park effects, it sounds to me like the Coors Effect is significantly exaggerated. For Rockies players, the inflationary effect of hitting at Coors is at least partially mitigated by the deflationary effect of hitting on the road—ie, the negative impact of going from altitude to sea level. But, if you just take the Rockies (deflated) road scoring at face value, that would pump up the scoring advantage at Coors even further. Instead, some adjustment needs to be made for the Rockies deflated road scoring. As a result of this mistake, Nolan Arenado’s park adjusted metrics (OPS+, wRC+, etc) are much higher in St Louis than Colorado for producing similar results.
Love the article! From your description of park effects, it sounds to me like the Coors Effect is significantly exaggerated. For Rockies players, the inflationary effect of hitting at Coors is at least partially mitigated by the deflationary effect of hitting on the road—ie, the negative impact of going from altitude to sea level. But, if you just take the Rockies (deflated) road scoring at face value, that would pump up the scoring advantage at Coors even further. Instead, some adjustment needs to be made for the Rockies deflated road scoring. As a result of this mistake, Nolan Arenado’s park adjusted metrics (OPS+, wRC+, etc) are much higher in St Louis than Colorado for producing similar results.