Will New Stadium Play The Same Way?

The analysis of park factors is something that fans have undertaken on a rudimentary level for years, referring to stadiums such as Coors as hitters’ parks and Shea as being pitcher friendly. Statisticians have been able to distill those park factors into a number on a 100 point scale, with parks above 100 being hitter friendly and those under 100 favoring pitchers. According to Aaron Gleeman, Fenway Park is currently the best hitting park in baseball, which does not surprise me, but may come as a shock to Jim Rice and his supporters. What I found interesting about the article was Gleeman’s thoughts about the new Yankee Stadium. The old Stadium has always  hovered around 100 on the park factor scale, and I figured that the new Stadium having the same dimensions would leave that unchanged. Not necessarily, says Gleeman:

New York Yankees – N/A
New York Mets – N/A

Two new ballparks in New York mean that we can forget everything we knew about Shea Stadium and the old Yankee Stadium. It may seem easy to predict how new ballparks will play based on the various dimensions, but that has actually been far less accurate than you’d think because wind patterns and hitting backgrounds also play huge roles in determining whether a new place will be good or bad for offense.

I would guess that we will not see a huge change in the park factor for Yankee Stadium being that the parks are situated so close to one another, but you never know. Would it benefit the 2009 Yankees for the park factor to go one way or another?

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