Additional Thoughts On The Left Field Project

I had been make comments and responding to people’s e-mails but I think in the pursuit of brevity it just seems smarter to make a blog post. The feed back has been excellent and I’m much appreciative of those that have ideas. But, I think needs to be redirection in this effort if ever so slightly. The search to find out how left field truely affects this offense isn’t about how many home runs are hit. Quantifying that isn’t really that difficult as many of you have pointed out there is hit tracker and multiple applications that I’m well aware of. Those utilities are many and it’s uses are very verstile that can come in handy when evaluating not just the hitter but also the pitcher to a degree.

The problem is we need more than just home run data. Home runs tell us how often the event occurs but it doesn’t tell us how often it doesn’t occur. We don’t know how many times the ball is actually hit to left field and that is more important than just how many home runs are hit. You could tell the different field and home splits by the many hitters employed at Safeco over the last 7 years that it’s an obvious factor of the park. The search is to find out to what degree is it a factor?

As I said, I’m not in favor of moving the fences but this is more than the usual “to help the offense hit better”, argument. Dave Cameron’s argument of it shrinking the talent pool of acqusitions is an interesting argument and it does lead one to at least question the sensibility of the situation. While certainly the fences are not what is the true factor in this case, the weather surely plays a very large determinating variable, this research would potentially tell us to a better degree how it helps/detracts. At least in my mind it would.

This is a look at HR/FB ratios for specific quadrants of the field and really a look at all specific quadrants HR/FB over  many different fields. As we could find that left field has a HR/FB ratio of 6.8% certainly that would be well below league average but how does that compare to other left fields? Are there worse places that we are missing by sure ignorance?

And then if you have the FB by quadrants you also can roughly look by how much offen

I’m not about arguing whether it is stupid or smart whether it is right or wrong. I just want to research facts.

Gameday does annotate ball positions but how would I translate that into excell and how could I map that out? If anyone has done anything like this or knows of anyone who I could pick their brain, I would love to see this done.

Again, maybe this is a lot of work that doesn’t really need to be and it can be produced in a much simplier fashion. Please show me, I’m anything but closed minded about furthering my knowledge.