Monday, May 25, 2009
New Yankee Stadium Splits through May 24
With the constant bleating about how New Yankee Stadium is an AL version of Coors Field, I decided to look at the actual data to see what it says. Of course, it's way too small of a sample size to make any definitive assessment about how the new Stadium is actually going to play. There's a reason most analysts who are worth a damn use at least three year park factors when doing any park adjusting. There's just too much noise in a single season's park factors. So you can probably imagine there's even more noise when looking at a quarter of a season's park factors.Anyway, all I'm doing here is presenting the data. I am not making any claims that this is how we should expect New Yankee Stadium to play going forward.
The Yankees have played 23 games at home and 22 on the road, although these numbers don't include today's thrashing of Texas at Arlington. Here are the splits for the Yankees and their opponents at New Yankee Stadium and on the road.
| Split | PA | AB | Hits | 2B | 3B | HR | BB | HBP | K | AVG | OBP | SLG | BR | BR/650 |
| NYS | 1887 | 1661 | 461 | 80 | 5 | 87 | 196 | 20 | 311 | .278 | .359 | .489 | 282 | 97 |
| Road | 1609 | 1421 | 373 | 92 | 8 | 49 | 152 | 19 | 286 | .262 | .338 | .442 | 212 | 86 |
| Combined | 3496 | 3082 | 834 | 172 | 13 | 136 | 348 | 39 | 597 | .271 | .349 | .467 | 494 | 92 |
BR above are context-neutral batting runs using linear weights which should help cancel out some of the noise that may show up in early season pure run totals. These are not position or park-adjusted. Using these numbers, I get the following component park factors.
| Stat | PF |
| AVG | 1.03 |
| OBP | 1.03 |
| SLG | 1.05 |
| 2B | 0.84 |
| HR | 1.16 |
| BB | 1.04 |
| K | 0.97 |
| BR | 1.06 |
A park factor greater than one favors hitters. Now obviously, the big number that every has been harping on is the homers, and yeah, 1.16 is high. But the bottom line is that scoring at New Yankee Stadium is currently playing at 1.06 park factor for runs, which is the only thing that really matters. That's high, but that ain't Coors Field.
When Peter Gammons says:
We have enough games and it wasn't a very well-planned ballpark. Any player will tell you that [the new Yankee Stadium] has become one of the biggest jokes in baseball.
I wonder if he is aware that his favorite team plays in park that has boosted run scoring by the following amount over the last five seasons?
2004: 1.09
2005: 1.03
2006: 1.02
2007: 1.11
2008: 1.05
Avg: 1.06
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