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Wood’s splits
June 15th, 2009, 12:51 pm · 5 Comments · posted by sammiller
Thanks to Stephen C. Smith for breaking down Brandon Wood’s splits in the PCL to exclude the league’s many hitter friendly parks.
Okay, per the above I split out Wood’s performance in the five hitter-friendly parks vs. the rest of the PCL. Here’s what I got:
Hitter-Friendly: .338/.415/.669 (130 AB)
Other: .178/.255/.400 (45 AB)11 of his 14 HR were in hitter-friendly parks, the rest in neutral/pitcher-friendly parks.
As much I want to see Woody in the big leagues, these numbers suggest maybe the Angels know what they’re doing by keeping him in Triple-A.
I don’t disagree with this, Stephen, but I also don’t quite agree. Based on those pitcher-friendly stats, his walk rate is about the same in unfriendly parks, his power rate is still pretty good, so we’re talking about a low batting average in a very small number of at bats. How small? He’s 8 for 45. If four more singles had fallen in, he’d be 12 for 45, and his line in unfriendly parks would be .266/.333/.489. Anytime the difference between terrible and good is four grounders finding holes or bleeders falling in, I’m hesitant to draw strong conclusions. I like where you’re going with this, but want to wait for a bit more data.
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Thanks, Sam … To play devil’s advocate … If you want to argue about hits falling in, the same argument could be made in the hitter-friendly parks too. We’d have to review each and every ball struck on every at-bat, which becomes an impossible task.
I’m aware that 45 AB is a small sample (so is 130 AB), but the point is that because most of Salt Lake’s games are played in hitter-friendly parks, you’re never going to have a big enough sample from neutral/pitcher-friendly parks to be satisfied. Half their games are in SLC, Colorado Springs is in their division, and Fresno/Reno/Las Vegas are in their conference. So the sample will always be much smaller for neutral/pitcher-friendly.
I’ll e-mail you the worksheet if you want to tinker with it.
“you’re never going to have a big enough sample from neutral/pitcher-friendly parks to be satisfied”
This is a very good point. I’m not sure how to get around it, except to remind ourselves to be humble w/ our conclusions. I’ll go first, haha.
Extra for experts, here are the splits for Sean Rodriguez:
Hitter-Friendly: .276/.345/.645 (152 AB)
Other: .264/.381/.604 (53 AB)
Some falloff is naturally to be expected, but this shows that Sean is more consistent, regardless of park.
Wood hit his 15th homer last night in Colorado Springs … elevation 6,000+ feet. Another super hitter-friendly ballpark.
Here’s an update on Woody’s PCL splits as of his July 10 promotion to Anaheim:
Hitter-Friendly: .344/.398/.651 (216 TPA)
Other: .234/.286/.442 (84 TPA)
Better in the neutral/pitcher-friendly parks, but still not reassuring.
The Bees have some road trips the next two months that take them to those “other” parks. I was looking forward to those because they would give us a larger statistical sample. But hopefully Woody hits well with the Angels and never returns to Salt Lake.