Wednesday, March 03, 2010
“That home run is an out at Citi Field”
Posted by Dan NovickI 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:
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.
Dan Novick is a lifelong Yankees fan, and still gets the chills every time Enter Sandman plays from the Yankee Stadium speakers. He welcomes comments and questions via e-mail.
Also fun: looking at foul-territory outs that go out of play in bigger yards. What a neat tool.