Some of you may have already read about this on Slack, for those who didn’t: I built a tool that uses Baseball Savant Batted balls data and projects those on general baseball park dimensions. So for example, if Joey Votto would have hit all his batted balls this season (Mar-Jn) in Fenway Park, he would have had 44 Homeruns! Aaron Judge would only be 10th with 37 in Fenway Park.
Some caveats apply: I compare batted ball distance and spray angle to general baseballpark dimensions, not including the fact that some stadiums have a massive wall in left field, nor weather, elevation, opposition strength, etc.
The whole tool / dashboard can be found here: https://public.tableau.com/views/MLBBattedBallAnalysis2017/BattedBallsDashboard?:embed=y&:display_count=yes
I also did a bit of a write-up on my blog to explain in a bit more detail how I did this dashboard. You can read it here.
It basically looks at what would actual batted balls from March-June this season have been in any ballpark (again, not considering walls etc.):
Some notes on how to read it:
I’d appreciate any feedback.
RJ
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I had quite some feedback about this dashboard which mainly resulted in discussions about using the “cricket style rope” for ballpark dimensions, basically ignoring the wall in outfield.
As it was hard to disagree with that this reduced the relevance significantly I did some more work to add the wall heights when guesstimating if a batted ball would have been a HR in another park.
Basically I calculated the height of the batted ball at the wall distance and compared the two. This still has some major caveats, as I use general ballpark dimensions, general wall heights, and my calculation of ball height at distance X is a rough estimation. But the first result are promising in parks like Fenway, so I feel like I’m on the right track.
The dashboard has been updated: https://public.tableau.com/profile/rj7974#!/vizhome/MLBBattedBallAnalysis2017/BattedBallsDashboard
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This is incredible work RJ - well done!
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Thanks Trey. I added an extension today that also lets you see the current season’s batted balls in the old ballparks:
So is Judge really a better HR hitter than Joe DiMaggio???
https://public.tableau.com/profile/rj7974#!/vizhome/HowdocurrentMLBplayersdoinoldparks/HowdocurrentMLBplayersdoinoldparks
Cheers!
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