The New Ballgame: Understanding Baseball Statistics for the Casual Fan (8 page)

Rule-makers rewrote the strike zone in 1988 with boundaries that were
"the midpoint between the top of the shoulders and the top of the uniform
pants, and the lower level is a line at the top of the knees." That was still a
smaller strike zone than the 1969 rule, but larger than the strike zone that had
evolved on the field. Offense dropped off immediately in 1988, but started to
climb again in the 1990s amid assertions that umpires were calling their own
strike zones again.

Then, after the 1993 expansion, offense soared. When the 1994 season
was aborted by a players strike six weeks early, Tony Gwynn was hitting
.394, with a shot at becoming the first .400 hitter in more than fifty years.
Matt Williams and Ken Griffey Jr. were on pace to break Maris' home-run
record. Albert Belle was threatening to break Earl Webb's sixty-three-yearold record of 67 doubles in a season. Great hitting feats were everywhere and
league-wide norms were reminiscent of the pre-World War II Lively Ball Era.
Offense was nearly as potent in 1995.

Major League Baseball's wrestling match with umpires over the strike
zone has continued ever since. In 2003 MLB installed computers in every
park to evaluate the umpires' ball-strike calls. Each home-plate umpire received a computerized report after every game showing how many calls the
computer said he "missed." With offense going ever higher, and home run
records falling faster than a teenager's heart, MLB renewed performance expectations for umpires in 2005. Pitchers held their own in 2005, but offenses
surged again in 2006, when run scoring, home runs, and batting average all
rose significantly.

The 1990s saw a slew of new construction of stadiums, most of which were
hitter-friendly ballparks. Many people new to baseball assume that ballparks
must follow strict standards of construction, at least where official play occurs, much like a football field or hockey rink. In reality, stadiums across
the country display a variety of setups and designs. Distance to the outfield
fences is just one of several things that determine whether a ballpark is pitcher-friendly or hitter-friendly. Atmospheric conditions-temperature, humidity, wind direction, altitude-also matter. The fences are a typical distance
in Colorado's Coors Field, but from the day it opened in 1995 it has been
Major League Baseball's best hitters' park because the ball carries a mile in
mile-high altitude with low humidity. The type of infield surface makes a difference too. Artificial turf yields more hits, doubles, triples and more stolen
bases because both the baseball and runners gain speed on it. Grass means
more errors, because bounces are less predictable, and fewer double plays,
because the ball gets to infielders slower.

Perhaps more consistently than anything else, how much foul territory
a park has determines whether or not a park will be hitter friendly. Oakland's
stadium, for example, has vast foul ground. It's a pitcher's park. Numerous
pop fouls that would land several rows into the seats at other parks are caught
easily in Oakland, denying batters another chance to get a hit or walk.

Almost all of the newer ballparks have scant foul ground. This is great
for fans, who now sit much closer to the action than in the 1970s and '80s,
when baseball was dominated by ballparks also used for football and other
events. Hardly any of those huge, uninviting parks are left. They have been
replaced by charming, baseball-only parks with fans close enough to see everything. These newer parks have been great for hitters as well.

A change in ballparks can change a player's statistical performance dramatically. Larry Walker was already a fine hitter when he played home games
in Montreal, a neutral park that offered no advantage to hitters or pitchers.
When he moved to Colorado and the best hitter's park in baseball in 1995,
everyone expected big things from Walker. Indeed, he won three batting titles
for the Rockies and twice had slugging averages above .700.

Teams tailor their talent to their ballparks' idiosyncrasies. The New
York Yankees, by far the most successful team since Yankee Stadium opened
in 1923, have relied on a long line of left-handed power hitters to take advantage of a right field fence much nearer to home plate than the fence in
left: Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, Graig Nettles,
Don Mattingly and Jason Giambi among them. Left-handed pitchers have the
advantage here, too, so the Yankees have relied on such aces as Herb Pennock, Lefty Gomez, Eddie Lopat, Whitey Ford, Ron Guidry, Andy Pettitte
and Randy Johnson.

With its left field "Green Monster" within such easy reach, Boston's
Fenway Park has been a hitter's dream for generations. Counterintuitively, it
is not the homer haven of lore. More balls go off that thirty-seven-foot wall
than over it. Fenway inflates batting averages and doubles. Red Sox players
have won twenty-five batting titles.

The Monster indisputably aids right-handed hitters. And yet, especially
since World War II, the Sox' best hitters have usually been lefties-Ted Williams, Carl Yastrzemski, Wade Boggs, David Ortiz, even Pete Runnels (a
two-time batting champion), Fred Lynn and Mike Greenwell. Why? Under
the Monster's influence, the Sox lineups have been overwhelmingly righthanded and the opposing pitchers have been disproportionately right-handed.
The Sox lefty hitters have been able to feast on that platoon advantage.

When the Brooklyn Dodgers dominated the National League from 1947
to 1956 (with seven pennants and two near misses), their powerful lineup
was so heavily right-handed that they seldom opposed a left-handed starting
pitcher. Roy Campanella, Gil Hodges, Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese and
Carl Furillo terrorized the lefties they saw. The Braves were contenders for
much of that decade, but they seldom pitched their ace, lefty Warren Spahn,
against the Dodgers. Spahn's few critics point out that he achieved his greatness without much work against the best team in the league. But then it is also
true that the Dodgers' Duke Snider built his Hall-of-Fame credentials as the
lone regular lefty hitter in a lineup that saw (almost) nothing but right-handed
pitching.

The Dodgers relied first on offense to dominate the NL when they
played in intimate Ebbets Field in Brooklyn. They relied primarily on superior pitching while winning seven NL pennants from 1963 to 1981 in pitcher friendly Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles.

Once, it seemed that every ballpark had its quirky uniqueness.

Wrigley Field in Chicago has its ivy-covered walls and hitter-friendly
winds (most of the time), carrying balls onto Waveland Avenue beyond a leftfield power alley that is one of the most easily reached in the game's history.

The horseshoe-shaped Polo Grounds in New York had foul lines of just
280 feet in left field and a mere 258 in right, but then the outfield took rightangle turns toward a vast center field that was commuter-flight distance from
home plate (more than 500 feet at one time). The Giants used pull hitters, of
course (Mel Ott, Johnny Mize, Bobby Thomson, et al). They set the thenmajor league record with 221 home runs in 1947, and then signed Willie
Mays, perhaps the best defensive center fielder ever, to cover the green ocean
that passed for the Polo Grounds outfield. It was here that Mays made his
legendary over-the-shoulder catch on the ball that Vic Wertz hit far, far from
home plate in Game 1 of the 1954 World Series. That catch propelled the underdog Giants to a shocking four-game sweep of the Cleveland Indians, who
had set the American League record with 111 wins that season.

The right field upper deck in Detroit's Tiger Stadium overhung the lower deck, creating cheap home runs for lefty batters. Washington's old Griffith
Stadium had fences more than 420 feet down the line in left field, as deep
there as it was to center field. Cincinnati's Crosley Field had a sloping terrace
that made fly-catching adventurous for left fielders. The fences in Pittsburgh's
Forbes Field were so distant and the outfield so vast that home runs were
scarce there, but triples were plentiful.

Philadelphia's old Baker Bowl had a right field fence a scandalous 300
feet from home plate to the power alley and 280 down the line. Its wall was made of tin and stood forty feet high-to prevent fans in homes beyond the
wall from seeing the game for free. Pitchers had little chance there, but the
Phillies' left-handed slugger Chuck Klein built his Hall-of-Fame caliber statistics there. Statistics like his 1930 line: .386 batting average, 59 doubles, 40
home runs, 170 RBIs, 158 runs scored.

Looking back at pitching and hitting statistics, these ballpark effects
need to be taken into account. In some places with very modern statistics,
you'll see the phrase, "park-adjusted." That is an attempt to adjust for the
variation caused by some ballparks.

One of baseball's most amusing stories involves Chuck Klein and that tin
wall. During the 1930 season, when the sorry pitchers on the last-place
Phils were getting shelled on a regular basis, pitching changes were
frequent. As the story goes, during one of those delays, Klein knelt in right
field and was daydreaming. The pitcher being yanked was so upset that
he took the baseball and fired it against the right-field wall. Startled, Klein
reacted on the belief that the game must have resumed. He fielded the
ball and fired a perfect strike to second-he'd had no small amount of
practice doing that during the Phils' miserable season.

By 1959 the prevailing mood was that teams had too much of a homefield edge, that fence dimensions and other conditions were being manipulated too often to cater to the home team's talent on hand. Standards were set:
After 1959, new ballparks had to be at least 325 feet down each line and at
least 400 feet to the center field fence.

This prevented some shenanigans, but variation remains. Some parks,
new and old, are friendlier to pitchers, some to hitters. Some are friendlier to
left-handers, some to right-handers. Houston's Astrodome, which opened in
1965, was a pitcher's paradise for thirty-five years. Home runs were not part
of the game plan there. In 2000 the Astros moved into their new ballpark, and
it is one of the friendliest in the league for right-handed hitters.

Artificial turf changed baseball. It changed the way the game was played and
who was allowed to play it. That's less of an issue now that the synthetic stuff
is pretty much confined to domed stadiums, like Minnesota. In the late 1970s
and all of the 1980s, nearly half the stadiums had it, creating frequent matchups between teams tailored for turf and opponents better suited to grass.

Speed, an advantage on grass, is essential on turf That's especially true
in the outfield, where balls gain speed with each bounce. If an outfielder fails
to reach the ball fast enough, hits that would have been a single on grass can
easily turn into extra bases. No team understood this better than the St. Louis
Cardinals, who played on turf when they were managed by Whitey Herzog
in the 1980s.

After three trips to the World Series in the 1960s, the Cardinals had
slipped into persistent mediocrity until Herzog took the wheel in 1981 and guided the Cardinals into the World Series in 1982, 1985 and 1987. The '87
team had only three of the lineup regulars (Ozzie Smith, Willie McGee and
Tom Herr) and one pitcher (Bob Forsch) common to the '82 team. They had a
different closer and a different lead RBI man each time. But all three had this
in common: the swiftest outfield, and the swiftest lineup in baseball.

In each year, the Cardinals were last in the majors in homers, but twice
led the NL in scoring. At or near the top of the NL in walks each season, they
led the NL in on-base percentage each season, usually ranked high in doubles
and triples, and led the majors in stolen bases each time. Lonnie Smith was
second in the NL with 68 steals in 1982. Vince Coleman succeeded Smith in
left field and led the majors with 110 and 109 steals in '85 and '87. McGee,
Andy Van Slyke, Ozzie Smith, Herr and Terry Pendleton were also base stealing threats. Without homers, the Cardinals let their legs put them in constant
scoring position.

The Cardinals didn't hit 100 homers in any of these seasons. They had
a pathetic 67 in 1982. In 1987 the Cardinals hit 94 home runs-the only team
with less than 100 and nineteen fewer than any other team. Conversely, the
Cubs, a grass-field team in a division with four turf opponents, hit an NL-best
209 home runs and finished last in the NL East.

The benefit of tailoring a team to its surroundings was on frequent display during the turf era. In 1982, '85 and '87 the Cardinals reached the World
Series after beating grass teams in the NL League Championship Series. At
the same time, St. Louis won only one of those World Series-against the
grass-fed Milwaukee Brewers in '82, but lost to the turf teams from Kansas
City ('85) and Minnesota ('87).

In 1982, the Cardinals won the seven-game Series by winning all four of the games on their home turf. The Brewers were 3-0 on grass, but their
much slower outfielders had trouble tracking down the Cardinals' hits in St.
Louis. In 1987, the Cardinals again won all their home games. But without
home-field advantage, they lost all four in Minnesota's peculiar park, where
the dome lighting, the extra-springy turf, and the baggy outfield walls always
bothered unfamiliar visiting teams.