“That home run is an out at Citi Field”

I wanted to just straight up steal the title of this post, but I couldn’t do it.

Thanks to Katron.org, we can now easily look at batted balls from one park and see what they look like in another park. Pretty cool, eh? This was done with home runs a while back using hit tracker data and photoshop, but that method had too many issues with it to make it useful. This new method is especially useful for players that have switched teams, and are now playing half of their games in a different ballpark. So let’s take a quick look at Curtis Granderson, the new center fielder for the Yankees:
image

The site does ignore atmospheric conditions and wall height, so it’s not perfect. But it’s pretty damn close. By my rough count, it looks like there are about 21 home runs on that image. That number could go up or down by a couple depending on whether or not you want to give Granderson credit for dots that are on the fence (pun intended). If we credit him for 21 home runs at home and add in the 20 he hit on the road in 2009, that would be a whopping 41 home runs, tops in the American League. Not too shabby.

This is just a fun exercise and shouldn’t be taken too seriously, but it’s somewhat informative nonetheless. I’ll probably play around with this some more as time permits and post anything else that jumps out.


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Joshua Fisher
14 years ago

Also fun: looking at foul-territory outs that go out of play in bigger yards. What a neat tool.

Joshua Fisher
14 years ago

Err—-smaller yards. I’m obviously too excited to form a proper comment at the moment.

Craig Glaser
14 years ago

I wish he had older stadiums as well.  It would be nice to see the Citi Field vs Shea Stadium comparison.

Scott
14 years ago

Just think of the money a guy like Adrian Gonzalez loses compared to someone like Ryan Howard of the Phillies.  Then imagine what their numbers would look like if they switched parks for a season.

JT Jordan
14 years ago

This site’s a lot of fun.

Adrian Gonzalez had 9 fly ball outs that “would have been” HR in Citizen’s Bank Park, 7 doubles that “would have” gone out, and the 12 blasts he had at PetCo.  That’s 28 HR by my count, and that would give him 56 on the season.  It also looks like he would have had roughly 52 at Fenway.

I just wish I could take it seriously.

Dan Novick
14 years ago

James,

The main problem (in my mind) with Peter’s tool was that it couldn’t handle long fly balls that weren’t home runs. This was a limitation of the data he was using, not the tool itself.

As you can see, this tool includes all of Granderson’s batted balls, not just his home runs. That gives you the ability to compare everything from one park to another.

James
14 years ago

Dan, thanks for the clarification. The methodology seemed sound enough, so it’s unsurprising that it was a data issue grin

Greg Rybarczyk
14 years ago

There are some scaling issues with the diagrams, too, so use caution.  Per the MLB diagrams, Tropicana Field’s LF pole (315 feet) is considerably (and I mean a lot) closer to home plate than Fenway Park’s LF pole (310 feet), for example.  But, the ability to quickly superimpose is great!

Peter
14 years ago

James/Dan,

My biggest issue was, like Dan mentioned, the long fly ball thing.  Also, the stadium dimensions weren’t nearly as accurate as I’d like and there is no web interface for my tool.

This tool, at least to some degree, corrects all three of those problems.

Dan Novick
14 years ago

Somehow, Johnny Damon doesn’t “lose” a single home run moving from Yankee Stadium to Comerica Park. Strange how that works.

Peter
14 years ago

You are right, this is a lot more useful than the Ballpark Overlay Tool I developed.

Thanks for publishing this, I really appreciate it.

James
14 years ago

Peter, what were some of the problems with the BallPark overlay tool that Dan mentioned?

Brian Cartwright
14 years ago

Really cool tool, but be aware of the limitationsin the source data.

Gameday records where the ball was retrieved, not where a fly ball hit landed. So you may see a bunch of fly balls on the warning track and conclude that they would be homeruns in a park with a shorter fence, but in reality quite a few of those balls shown up against the fence rolled there after landing some distance shorter.

Brian Cartwright
14 years ago

*fly ball hits on the warning track – fly ball outs are recorded as we would expect