Walk Like a Sabermetrician

I intend to be doing a little more blogging on the Ohio State baseball program this year, and I will mark these posts with the "OSU BB" prefix before the title. I will be blogging on OSU baseball whenever I feel like it, as well as general baseball news when I feel like it. I also intend to post at least one sabermetric-related piece around Monday each week. That will continue next week with the conclusion of the WAT series.

Anyway, today I decided to look at the park factor for Bill Davis Stadium. I have never actually sat down and figured it out, so I looked at 2002-2006 data. I only looked at OSU home v. road games in the Big Ten.

In 79 B10 home games, OSU scored 421 runs and allowed 362, for 9.91 RPG. In 69 road games, OSU scored 454 runs and allowed 334, for 11.42 RPG. Interestingly, OSU scored more on the road and allowed more at home, giving the Buckeyes a .573 Pythpat record at home v. .651 on the road, which is very strange. In fact, OSU was 50-29 (.633) at home and 41-28 (.594) on the road. I don't know what to make of that.

Anyway, if we convert the RPG ratio into a PF, we get .879. However, this is just a factor for application to home stats, not to composite stats. In a major league situation, I’d just take the average of .879 and 1 to account for this. However, thanks to the fact that you can’t play baseball in Ohio in February and March, the Buckeyes over the same five year period have played 123 games at home and 179 on the road (40.7% home).

So assuming that the road park is average, the park factor is now .407*.879 + .593 = .951. I also regress this at 40% toward the mean, since the number of games in the sample is about the same as one major league season, and 40% is the factor I would use for that. So we end up with a PF of 97.

So it appears that Bill Davis Stadium is a fairly strong pitching park that has its influence on the Buckeyes’ statistics made fairly moderate by the extremely unbalanced schedule.