On Deck is back and better than ever in 2007! We'll be bringing you new features targeted at specific positions, areas of statistical dominance, and even take a look at the upcoming schedule each week so you can figure out which teams have a favorable schedule coming up and which teams might struggle. Much like The Hook will be doing this season, we'll be breaking things down in specific areas so you can easily find what you're looking for!
You could venture to argue that if you went to ten different
sites, you would get ten slightly
different results about how they view a ballpark.Why is this?Beyond the obvious differences in how people modify certain areas of
performance, they occasionally use slightly different data sets.What we believe at FIC is that the most
accurate way to determine how each ballpark plays is to look at how the team
that plays there the most (in other words, the team that calls it home)
performs there in comparison to how they play on the road.With some very slight differences (primarily interleague play), each team will play almost exactly the
same competition in their 81 home games that they do in their 81 road games.
We’ll begin our look around the league at how each park
plays with what many novice fantasy owners tend to consider the only factor that they care about when
determining what are hitter’s parks and what are pitcher’s parks: The Home
Run.While the home run actually plays
only a small part in how a ballpark plays overall, it’s clearly among the most
important factors that need to be analyzed to determine a ballpark’s
performance.To give a little insight as
to how drastically the home runs
affect a ballpark’s overall performance, one of our top rated hitter’s park for
the 2006 season (Kaufmann Stadium) yielded just 167 home runs last season.In fact, the Royals and their opponents
combined for three more home runs when Kansas City
took their show on the road.
To compile our data for this study, we gathered the data for
each team in MLB both at home and on the road for each of the past three
seasons.Rather than simply taking the
total home runs that each park yielded, we compared it with how the same two
teams performed in the other parks (i.e., when the team that called that park
home was on the road).We then
subtracted each team’s road performance from their home performance to come up
with the overall differential in home runs allowed during, for example, White
Sox home games and White Sox road games.Speaking of the White Sox, U.S. Cellular earned a clean sweep in the
past three seasons as the top home run hitter’s park.I guess the Hawk can put it on the board.
Apart from that, we’re just going to let the numbers speak
for themselves….
Fantasy Baseball 
