In home games, the Braves have hit .282/.363/.466.
In road games, they’ve hit .214/.271/.325.
Their home OPS is fourth in the league behind the Rockies, Dodgers, and DBacks — two teams who play in extreme hitter’s parks, and one team with an offense that’s been lights-out this season. On the road, their OPS ranks last.
Turner Field has indeed played as a hitter’s park this year. The Braves’ home ERA is 3.63, eighth in the league. On the road, it’s 2.61, second. Overall, it’s 3.04, second to the Marlins.
Considering that the Braves have played at Enron/MinuteMaid, Bank One and RFK (the first two being extreme hitter parks, while the book is still out on RFK) what do we make of this?
Seeing as they are headed to Shea, which like Turner is a pitcher’s park, maybe they’ll do okay.
What do we make of this?
Two words: sample size
Hey, you can’t always dismiss the results of a small sample — if you did, you’d never spot a trend or identify a burgeoning problem. You’d just have to be told about it in retrospect.
They are only hitters’ parks when people are hitting. That Astros’ team we saw last week had Rip van Winkle bats (as did we). Same goes for the Phils.
Some of it small sample size, but I’ve always believed that it’s important to look at “when” you are playing a team as much as “who” you are playing. Phils and ‘stros just aren’t hitting much now. And up until this weekend, neither were we.
Anyone notice that Tom Martin was signed to a minor league contract by the Astros? Hope he makes the big club later this year and then gets to pitch against us !
The best pitcher that we have seen at The Ted this season is Pedro. On the road we have seen The Rocket, and Lieber. They put us in a slump.
The Rocket has had three runs of run support this season, he has driven in tow of the three him self. That is the stat of the day.
I released Tom Martin from my APBA team today. It came down to him and Matt Perisho, and while Martin was slightly better in the 2004 season we’re playing, I had to go with Perisho for karmic reasons.
Mac,
Have you seen this?
http://www.sabr.org/sabr.cfm?a=cms,c,1071,40
http://www.tedfriedman.com/archives/2005/03/bill_james_reth.php
Apparently Bill James has revised some of his theories on clutch hitting – I can’t find it online anywhere, but am interested to know what he said…
Jonathan,
James’ article is available here: http://www.sabr.org/cmsfiles/underestimating.pdf You need Adobe to read it.
Short version: Showing that there is no measurable effect is not the same as no effect; there is too much uncertainty in the statistics to make a definiative statement about the lack of clutch hitters, individual platoon distinctions, catcher pitch calling, or other similar things studied by modern sabermetricians including James himself.
I find it a bit dispiriting that James, after spawning a thriving industry we know as sabermetrics, casts aside innumerable studies showing no persistent tendency for clutch hitting ability with the “no-duh” observation that you can’t prove a negative. Maybe he’s endured one too many smug observations that clutch hitting doesn’t exist, and is merely being contrarian at this point. Still, I wish he would stick to his guns. He couldn’t find it, and nobody else has either, to my knowledge. I would think he’d acknowledge that claiming flaws in experimental design only goes so far — sooner or later, you have to acknowledge the findings.