Wednesday, February 28, 2007

How Many Home Runs Would You Have in Fenway

I don't know if I have mentioned the website hardballtimes here, but I just finished reading a great article from there. The hardballtimes has many great articles a day. Most are stat-heavy, analytical findings that shine light on different aspects of the game.

For example this article is about how many more home runs would a player have in a season if he played for Boston rather than the Nationals, since the Monster at Fenway is much closer than the deep wall in RFK. He uses data about where fly ball outs landed that players hit. What it basically comes down to is that he looked to see from the data he had if some of the fly ball outs would be hits had they been hit in Fenway. Obviously the Green Monster allows for many more doubles and home runs. Similarly, the short porch in Houston causes the same effect.
The interesting thing about this is that J.D. Drew, a big offseason signing by the Red Sox (can't say the biggest because of Dice-K), has a lot of hits to deep left field and a lot of outs that may be hits at home in Boston, which would help the Red Sox out a lot this season.
He does finally come up with a number for the amount of outs that would be hits in Fenway and ranks players based on how many more hits they would get from the change in venue. Topping the list is Chipper Jones. J.D. Drew is in the top 15 of the list and interestingly enough Pat Burell is in the top 25 of the list. There's really nothing useful about that stat besides maybe the Phillies shouldn't have moved the wall back.
On that note, I'm curious as to what the final count of fly ball outs that would have been home runs the year before. Did the Phillies ever release an "official guess" amount?

The HardBall Times

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