Park Factor in One Image

[NAHSTE]

Call your power alleys tonight and tell them that you love them.

 

[Warner2BruceTD]

go home NAHSTE, you're drunk

 

[NAHSTE]

go home NAHSTE, you're drunk

Not even mad, always found it fascinating that teams could make their field whatever size they wanted. Makes for a lot of variance.

 

[Warner2BruceTD]

Bill James wrote an essay once saying that he thinks other sports should do this.

Basketball, for instance, could have wider or longer or more narrow court sizes. Teams with shorter or more narrow courts would build big, defensive, inside scoring teams, while teams that played on wider or longer courts would build faster, smaller, better shooting teams.

Football would work the same way. With a wider or longer field, you would want a stronger passing game, and so on.

I happen to agree. The only reason people think it sounds absurd in either case, is because it's just always been standardized. Baseball has never been standardized, so people accept every park being different.

 

[Warner2BruceTD]

Found this quote (in response to grass length of all things) which basically hits on what he wrote in the essay:

I think so. . .there may be some MLB policy regulating the length of grass, but I’m not aware of it. Honestly, major league baseball—and all sports—would be far better off if they would permit teams to do more to make one park distinctive from another—even so far as making the bases 85 feet apart in one park and 95 in another. Standardization is an evil idea. Let’s pound everybody flat, so that nobody has any unfair advantage. Diversity enriches us, almost without exception. Who would want to live in a world in which all women looked the same, or all restaurants were the same, or all TV shows used the same format? People forget that into the 1960s, NBA basketball courts were not all the same size--and the NBA would be a far better game today if they had never standardized the courts. What has happened to the NBA is, the players have gotten too large for the court. If they hadn’t standardized the courts, they would have eventually noticed that a larger court makes a better game—a more open, active game. And the same in baseball. We would have a better game, ultimately, if the teams were more free to experiment with different options. The only reason baseball didn’t standardize its park dimensions, honestly, is that at the time that standardization was a dominant idea, they just couldn’t. Because of Fenway and a few other parks, baseball couldn’t standardize its field dimensions in the 1960s—and thus dodged a mistake that they would otherwise quite certainly have made. Standardization destroys the ability to adapt. Take the high mounds of the 1960s. We “standardized” that by enforcing the rules, and I’m in favor of enforcing the rules, but suppose that the rules allowed some reasonable variation in the height of the pitching mound? What would have happened then would have been that, in the mid-1990s, when the hitting numbers began to explode, teams would have begun to push their pitching mounds up higher in order to offset the hitting explosion. The game would have adapted naturally to prevent the home run hitters from entirely having their own way. Standardization leads to rigidity, and rigidity causes things to break.

 

[NAHSTE]

To further illustrate, there's this... According to hittracker, this Yuni Betancourt HR would only have gone out in exactly 1 major league ballpark. It was off Vogelsong so I included his home park overlay.

http://mlb.mlb.com/video/play.jsp?content_id=26361435&topic_id=&c_id=mlb&tcid=vpp_copy_26361435&v=3

 

[NAHSTE]

As for other sports, there is some freedom in soccer. It has to be within a certain range but there is some degree of variance. The largest field in the English Premier League in 2012 was 116x76, and the smallest was 110x70. There were some old NHL rinks before the 90s arena wave that were a few feet smaller too, but that was just due to space reasons. I think the NBA could stand to widen the court in general across all teams.

As for football I think it would be cool to see some flexibility on width, somewhere between 51 and 55. Think that could really be effective on the college level where there is a wider disparity of talent and more variety of styles.

 

[Warner2BruceTD]

Doesn't European hockey have varying ice sizes? I could be 100% wrong, but I thought I remember reading that.

 

[Goober]

Everyone knows Miller Park has a stigma for giving up long balls, but what reason do the Brewers have to change it? It plays to their hitters strengths. Either way the pitching will be garbage, the moon shots they give up are easy home runs at Miller and Petco.

 

[killgod]

Doesn't European hockey have varying ice sizes? I could be 100% wrong, but I thought I remember reading that.

The NHL uses a smaller rink size than European or International play does.

Soccer teams globally have a range their field size has to be in, so they too can vary.

 

[FedEx227]

Bill James wrote an essay once saying that he thinks other sports should do this.

Basketball, for instance, could have wider or longer or more narrow court sizes. Teams with shorter or more narrow courts would build big, defensive, inside scoring teams, while teams that played on wider or longer courts would build faster, smaller, better shooting teams.

Football would work the same way. With a wider or longer field, you would want a stronger passing game, and so on.

I happen to agree. The only reason people think it sounds absurd in either case, is because it's just always been standardized. Baseball has never been standardized, so people accept every park being different.

I think that's really it. Baseball is grandfathered in and it adds to it's charm. It's history is based in odd shaping, weird fields/configs while the other sports aren't. It would just be so hard to next year decide that the Warriors are going to have a longer court than the Celtics. There's just so much adjustment and weirdness to it.

 

[Senser81]

As for football I think it would be cool to see some flexibility on width, somewhere between 51 and 55. Think that could really be effective on the college level where there is a wider disparity of talent and more variety of styles.

I think that would be a terrible idea. So much of football is timing in the passing game, QBs throwing before their WR makes his cut, etc. I can imagine a football robot like Peyton Manning completing sideline passes at home, then on the road his passes mysteriously land 5 yards out of bounds because the opponent brought in the sidelines.

 

[Senser81]

Before computers, I used to have a tabletop baseball game that was a gigantic grid, and you'd overlay the particular stadium and all batted balls would have a "grid coordinate"...so Keith Moreland hitting a ball to grid coordinate "H-27" would be a routine fly out at Wrigley, but a monster HR shot in the Polo Grounds. Kind of an interesting idea, but games took FOREVER to play.

 

[jms493]

Before computers, I used to have a tabletop baseball game that was a gigantic grid, and you'd overlay the particular stadium and all batted balls would have a "grid coordinate"...so Keith Moreland hitting a ball to grid coordinate "H-27" would be a routine fly out at Wrigley, but a monster HR shot in the Polo Grounds. Kind of an interesting idea, but games took FOREVER to play.

Were you a Strat-O-Matic kind of guy?

 

[Senser81]

Were you a Strat-O-Matic kind of guy?

I had a few different tabletop baseball games, but Strat-O-Matic wasn't one of them. They all sucked though. Games would always take a long time, and pitching was kind of bogus. I remember in APBA, all pitchers were one of three types...A (good), B (average), C (bad).

The best baseball game I had as a kid was a C64 game called "Computer Baseball".

 

[jms493]

My older brother would play a lot of SOM Hockey. He would make me play him...didnt really know what I was doing. It was kind of fun.

 

[Warner2BruceTD]

My father had a Strat-O-Matic game that featured all hall of famers instead of the traditional "season" version. He kept meticulous stat sheets of his games in a gigantic notebook complete with "league leaders" and complete "career" numbers on every player. I remember Three Finger Brown being particularly dominant on the mound, with a sub 1.00 ERA.

Anyway, my mother sold the game in a yard sale. He went ballistic. I mean, the man worked seven days per week, and he had at least 15 years worth of game records compiled in that thing. It was one of his few leisure activities. Wouldn't be shocked if it was one of the many factors involved in the divorce.

 

[NAHSTE]

Anyway, my mother sold the game in a yard sale. He went ballistic. I mean, the man worked seven days per week, and he had at least 15 years worth of game records compiled in that thing. It was one of his few leisure activities. Wouldn't be shocked if it was one of the many factors involved in the divorce.

Unforgivable. And yet, they will never understand.

 

[NAHSTE]

Back on topic, I think the process behind a team building a new park and deciding on dimensions is fascinating. I know they must run a ton of statistical models before finalizing wall height and outfield size, but we've seen a handful of teams admit a few years in that they got things totally wrong. (Comerica, Safeco, Petco and Citi fences, the Marlins retractable roof which they learned they can almost never open.)

Some teams choose to live with it, but I wonder how much of how a park ends up playing is intentional and how much is guesswork.

 

[FedEx227]

The Twins essentially destroyed Mauer's power when they built Target Field. That's one of the most galling examples I can remember in recent years of not at least taking into consideration your current personnel. I know Wright had a lot of issues with Citi Field as well.