How do Baseball Stadium Dimensions Affect Batting Statistics? *
| Difficulty | |
| Time Required | Short (2-5 days) |
| Prerequisites | Basic knowledge of Microsoft Excel and statistics |
| Material Availability | Readily Available |
| Cost | Very Low (under $20) |
| Safety | No issues. |
*Note: This is an abbreviated Project Idea, without notes to start your background research, a specific list of materials, or a procedure for how to do the experiment. You can identify abbreviated Project Ideas by the asterisk at the end of the title. If you want a Project Idea with full instructions, please pick one without an asterisk.
Abstract
Here's a fun project that combines baseball and math. Major League baseball is played in ballparks that have their own individual quirks when it comes to the exact layout of the field. Fenway Park in Boston has the famous "Green Monster" in left field, Yankee Stadium in the Bronx is notorious for the "short porch" down the right field line, and Coors Field in Denver is at a much higher altitude than any other ballpark. How do these differences affect batting statistics? You'll need to do a little digging to pull the numbers together, but a nice thing about this project is that the experiments are already done, and the data is out there waiting for you.Objective
The objective of this project is to determine how the dimensions of a baseball stadium affect batting statistics.
Credits
Gabriel Desjardins
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Last edit date: 2013-01-10
Introduction
Even in modern baseball, not all stadiums are the same size. A player who hits .300 with 30 home runs in one stadium could be a .250 hitter with 15 home runs in another park. Which parks are good hitter's parks, and which are not?
Terms and Concepts
Park effects, park dimensions, Coors Field
Bibliography
ESPN offers detailed statistics for all teams in Major League Baseball and is the best place to collect the data for this project:
http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/statistics
Experimental Procedure
Calculate the average for every team's home and road batting statistics (as well as their opponent's) over the time that they've been playing in a particular park. Since the average road park is nearly the same as the league's average park, the difference between home and road performance is the home park's effect on offense.
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Variations
- Other factors come into play, particularly altitude and weather. Altitude is easy to quantify since it doesn't change, but matching weather data with batting stats will require some programming.
- Sometimes the dimensions of ball parks change when a stadium is remodeled—for example, the Oakland Athletics home park used to have a lot more foul ground around home plate. This gives you a chance to analyze a "natural experiment." You can select a group of players and analyze their hitting statistics before and after the remodeling to see what affect it had on their hitting. (How do you think hitting statistics would be affected by shrinking foul territory around home plate? Do you think you could find individual variations by hitting style?) You'll have to do some research to find out when changes were made, and what the ballpark dimensions were before and after remodeling.
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