A Sea of Green

On Monday night I took my family to Coors Field for the first time to see a game played at altitude - which the Rockies won 7-6 I might add. As I explained to my nine-year old daughter with her eyes glazed over somewhere around the fourth inning, "lots of runs are scored at Coors Field and one of the hypotheses* given for this is that the fences must be very deep so that there aren’t too many homeruns, but one of the side effects is that more singles and doubles fall in front of the outfielders".

* We home school and so any time you can throw in a word from a recent lesson you do

She nodded as her eyes fixated on the cotton candy vendor and I went back into my contemplation of these and other great thoughts. But it occurred to me that I hadn’t ever actually seen any data that would support this hypothesis so I dug into the play by play data for 2004. I reasoned that Coors Field would produce more singles and doubles classified as fly ball or popup than would other parks. I wrote a quick query and found the following:

       Fly Pop Total
MIN    170   9  179
BOS    125   6  131
CHN    120  10  130
NYN    108  11  119
CHA    104   8  112
BAL     99   7  106
COL     94   6  100
NYA     95   3   98
ANA     87   8   95
KCA     84   4   88
SFN     72  12   84
HOU     79   5   84
PIT     74   6   80
PHI     73   7   80
FLO     71   5   76
DET     66   8   74
SLN     67   4   71
ATL     64   6   70
SEA     55  11   66
LAN     55  11   66
OAK     54   7   61
TBA     55   5   60
TEX     51   4   55
SDN     51   2   53
MIL     47   6   53
CLE     41  10   51
MON     43   6   49
TOR     41   4   45
ARI     34   3   37
CIN     34   1   35

This of course is not really what I was expecting. Could it really be possible that there were 170 fly ball singles in the Metrodome but only 34 in the Great American Ballpark, a ratio of 5 to 1? And why would there be 125 fly ball singles in Fenway Park, a ballpark with a small outfield?

When looked at in total Coors Field did produce the most singles at 1,104, just ahead of Anaheim at 1,097. Of those, 556 were line drives with only the Ballpark at Arlington producing more at 557, and 448 were ground balls with Detroit far outpacing the field at 539.

Putting these questions aside I went ahead and ran a similar query for doubles.

     Fly Pop Total
BOS  186  3  189
CLE  157  1  158
COL  146  2  148
SDN  141  2  143
MIN  140  2  142
PIT  131  1  132
SEA  130  0  130
CHN  127  3  130
NYN  127  2  129
ATL  124  2  126
HOU  119  2  121
ARI  114  0  114
FLO  112  1  113
NYA  106  2  108
TOR  105  1  106
TEX   98  0   98
MON   94  0   94
SFN   92  2   94
BAL   91  2   93
ANA   90  2   92
PHI   83  3   86
KCA   77  3   80
OAK   80  0   80
CHA   80  0   80
CIN   76  0   76
SLN   74  0   74
DET   70  1   71
TBA   66  0   66
LAN   56  3   59
MIL   50  0   50

Now this was really disturbing. While Coors Field ranked third, Boston still had 186 fly ball doubles while Milwaukee had just 50. Again, when looked at in total Coors Field produced the second most doubles at 379 (Fenway saw 395) with 188 line drives and 42 ground balls.

So in summary Coors produced the most singles and second most doubles but this analysis did not support the hypothesis that this is because more balls fall in front of outfielders who have to cover the spacious outfield. My daughter will no doubt be thrilled by my analysis.

In thinking about these results I was reminded of Joe Buck calling last year’s World Series and his annoying habit of describing every ball hit into the outfield as a popup, many of which traveled 350 feet or more. Taking the "Buck Factor" in account, the large differences between parks I think can better be explained by differences in how those who score the games interpret fly balls and popups. From my experience scoring games for MLB.com (from which this data is derived I believe) it is sometimes difficult to decide where the line is between ground ball and line drive, popup and flyball, and flyball and line drive. Generally, my criteria is that if a ball touches the ground before it reaches the outfield grass it is a ground ball. If a ball is hit on an arc greater than around 30 degrees (definitely subject to a lot of interpretation), the ball is a flyball if it travel more than 200 feet or a popup if less. Everything else is a line drive. I also use the L- scoring as in S9/L- (single to right on a softly hit line drive) for flares that fall in over the infield.

Of course if anyone has any better data on this I'd love to see it...