Returning to Coors Field

For the first time in over a year, I made it to Coors Field for a Rockies game on Monday.  Though I missed the real excitement by one day (yesterday's game had a little bit of everything), the opener of the Astros series had a couple innings worth remembering.

First off, the Rockies - after much mocking by me and my fellow attendees for their abysmal offense - managed to score six runs in the first inning.  This offensive explosion proved enough to win the game, though the home team, in another shocker, managed to tack on to the lead in later innings.

All was not peachy in Rockie-ville, however, as J.C. Romero and Josh Roenicke combined to surrender 4 runs and record one out in the ninth inning of what had been a 9-1 game.  Rafael Betancourt was summoned to close out the game, which he did promptly by retiring two batters in, roughly, seven and a half hours.

The final out was a strikeout of former Rockie Clint Barmes, who batted with two runners on base and a chance to bring the game to one run.  Even as a die-hard Rockies fan, a small part of me secretly wished that Barmes would have hit the ball out.  As one expects with Barmes, however, occasional power comes with frequent strikeouts and popups, and so the game was hardly in doubt.  Betancourt, especially, is the kind of pitcher that Barmes struggles to hit well, and while he had a battlers at bat, he never seemed likely to square anything up.

The details of the game, of course, were nothing remarkable.  Instead, the reason I mention it in this space is because of the chance to return to Coors Field.  Recently Rob Neyer sung the only slightly over-exaggerated praises of the park I grew up in.  While even I'm hesitant to call it the best of the last 50 years, there's no doubt that it's an amazing stadium.  The views of the mountains alone are enough to separate Coors from most any other ballpark.

Unfortunately, we sat away from the mountains, instead finding ourselves behind the left field foul pole.  Our slightly-obstructed view of the infield meant that Mark Ellis was hard to see.  Which is fine, because he still barely feels like a Rockie to me (though an offseason resigning seems plausible, if unfortunate).  On the other hand, we had an unparalleled view of Eric Young Jr., who continues, for some reason, to play out-of-position in left field.  Though, as fellow attendee Joe observed, Eric Young Jr. is out of position no matter where he plays, so there is that.

Me and the view from our seats.

As for ballpark banter, my favorite incident was our critique of a nearby fan's unfortunate sign.  It read "CarGo's #5 Fan."  Clever, at first blush, because Cargo's number is, of course, 5.  Not clever because it lacks the usual fanbole (fan hyperbole, per Joe Posnanski) of always using superlatives.  Perhaps, we discussed, it could be an ironic sign?  But the other side of the same poster-board said that it was the fan's first game at Coors, which suggests, instead, an unintentional faux pas in sign construction.

With Eric Young Jr. continuously in view, we hatched a plan for how to improve the sign.  Eric Young Jr. wears the number 1 - because, hey, that's what 5'10''* utility infielders/outfielders/fast-guys-who-don't-play-defense wear.  Combined with EY Jr.'s status as the son of Eric Young - of first Colorado home run fame - and you have the much better sign: "EY2's #1 fan."  Much, much better.

* Standing next to Dexter Fowler, Eric Young looks like a small child.  Dexter is 6'4'', though he only weighs, per baseball reference, 10 pounds more than EY.  Also, for some reason Dex can't steal bases.

The original sign showed its weaknesses in particular when Cargo came up with the bases loaded in the 8th inning. As Joe observed, "Cargo's #5 fan must be really excited, right now."  "Yes," I responded, "but there are four people more excited."

Perhaps all of this sounds irrelevant.  But that's exactly the point.  Watching baseball on television (or MLB.tv, anyway) for the past year, I forgot how different it is to watch in person, with friends.  There's a vitality to the experience that is lacking even on the most vivacious Purple Row game thread.  The game is alive.  What you lose in ability to see strikes and balls on television, you gain in the ability to watch the defense.  What you lose in announcing (which, frankly, is little with the Rockies broadcast crew) you gain in the quips and jabs of surrounding fans.

To those of you who live near baseball stadiums, this is not news.  But living in Hawaii - despite its many virtues - makes you forget the magic of baseball.  Even a mediocre, meaningless August game at Coors Field is enough to remind my why I love the sport, and why, even in the leanest and meanest times, I'll always be a Rockies fan.  In the end, it's not about the Rockies at all.  It's about being there - about feeling and seeing the game around you.  And, in my case, it's about Coors Field, because that's where I learned to love and understand the game, and the place that will always define my fandom.  Even if I live the rest of my life in the Bay Area, the Rockies will be my team because Coors Field is my baseball home.  And it was good to be home again, if only for one game.

The Language of Degree and Kind in Baseball and Life

This post is also available - with pictures and dancing bears - at Pitchers and Poets.  I lied about the bears.

When we construct our little narratives to explain the strange things we see every day, we tend to lump our world into broad categories.  Actions are "good" or "bad," "smart" or "dumb."  People are "tall" or "short," "happy" or "sad."  Sporting events are "entertaining" or "boring."  Politicians are "liberal" or "conservative."  And so on, a veritable smörgåsbord* of quotated and contrary descriptors.  Here at Nicht Diese Tone, of course, we think this stuff is all hogwash.  Most of the time, when you're confronted with a duality, it's very probable that you're oversimplifying things.  While that oversimplification may be a real time saver - indeed, our ability to do so with such verve and expertise might very well be a key part of our relative evolutionary success - it can also be extremely dangerous.

* Much to my surprise and pleasure, my spell check added the umlaut and the circle thingy over the a.

Much as I'd love to illustrate the point with something profound and socially meaningful, my April-addled mind can't help but turn to baseball as a perfect locus for the issue.  The advantage of baseball over things like, say, politics or morality are numerous.  The chief reasons, however, are only two: 1) baseball is far less contentious than politics or morality* and 2) baseball is much, much, much easier to quantify, which will help to illustrate the point.

* This is not, strictly speaking, true, as the recent Dodgers-fan led assault against a Giants fan - leaving the man in a coma - attests.  Nevertheless, it's much easier for most of us to put aside our sporting-related differences than our political ones.

In particular I want to look at the beloved home of my beloved (and, as of this writing, 12-3) Colorado Rockies, the notorious Coors Field.  Coors Field is, in our dualistic narratives, a "hitter's haven."  It's a miraculous spa where batting averages go to recover and ERAs go to die, a slugger's wet dream and a scrappy, replacement-level slap hitter's salvation.  Otherwise insignificant careers have been forged (Neifi Perez, Juan Pierre), mediocre major leaguers have been saved (Preston Wilson, Kurt Manwaring), over-the-hill sluggers reborn (Jason Giambi), stars made into superstars (Todd Helton, Larry Walker), and aspiring pitchers wrecked (Mike Hampton, Denny Neagle, Pedro Astacio, Daryl Kile, Bret Saberhagen, Greg Harris, and on and on) by its thin air and its cavernous outfield.  In the popular narrative of Coors Field, it is an almost mystical place, one man's Heaven and another's Hell, a Miltonian paradox.

Until the advent - and advent is exactly the right word - of the capital-H Humidor, playing at Coors Field was like stepping into a video game.  Every decent hitter would hit .350 and slug 40 or 50 homers, as if controlled by some over-obsessive teenager on his X-Box.  It was so easy, scores were routinely closer to football (or even basketball) proportions than proper baseball ones.

The Humidor, of course, changed all of that, transforming Coors Field from Bichette's Paradiso to the upper echelons of Purgatorio instead.* No longer a panacea for ailing bats, it became, instead, a kind of minor boost along the lines of many other so-called hitter's parks.  Suddenly pitchers with mediocre stuff like Jason Jennings and Jeff Francis could throw complete game shutouts, and Rockies 8-hole hitters stopped hitting above .300.  The narrative transformed, enough that Coors Field and Humidor became opposing watchwords, simultaneously an excuse to disparage Rockies hitters for their advantages and mock pitchers for their crude, cigar-inspired handicap.

* I will not apologize for the Dante reference, even though it is also a terrible pun. 

Undoubtedly you can tell what I'm going to say, but I'll say it anyway.  It's all a bunch of sensationalist nonsense.  Because we like to explain the world through clean, discrete, and ultimately meaningless categories Coors Field is painted as a "hitter's park."  And it is.  The problem is, it's only a marginally better place to hit than anywhere else in baseball.  It is, by degree, a better environment for hitters than, say, the Ballpark at Arlington or Fenway Park, but we have created a narrative where it is fundamentally different in kind.  Coors Field is a magical place in that narrative, even if its (post-humidor) Park Factor of roughly 115 means that only 15% more runs are scored there than the average stadium (let alone other good hitter's parks).*

* The pre-humidor PF for Coors was, again roughly, 125.  Big?  Yes.  Infinite?  Not quite.

This "difference in kind" thinking is responsible for the hullabaloo about the Rockies cheating by storing some balls in the humidor, while keeping others in the dry mountain air in case of late-inning emergency.  The difference between the pre-humidor 25% increase in runs and the post-humidor 15% increase in runs is, of course, only 10%.  Since, even at Coors, most teams average less than one run an inning, the difference between using the non-humidor balls and the humidor balls in the final inning of a game comes out to somewhere around one extra Rockies run every month (which, we can assume, would lead to maybe one extra win over the course of the entire season).  That's a real difference in degree, of course, but that's not the narrative we hold dear.

Instead, as last season drew to a close, the Rockies were accused of cheating, their successes at home pinned on a vast late-inning conspiracy.  With humidorized baseballs, the story went, the Rockies were a normal baseball team, capable of scoring runs, yes, but also capable of striking out, hitting into double plays, and regularly stranding runners who reached third with no one out.  Bring out non-humidor balls, however, and the Rockies became unstoppable, a force not merely capable of destroying even the best of pitchers, but indeed destined to overcome any deficit, no matter how large.  To this way of thinking, the difference between the humidor and non-humidor baseballs was not 10% more runs, but rather "win" instead of "loss."  The whole picture became about differences in kind (wins and losses) instead of differences in degree (15% more runs than average and 25% more).

The same, of course, is true about pre-humidor Coors.  That Park Factor of 125 is big.  Really big.  Big enough that the Rockies routinely had one of the worst offenses in Major League Baseball during the early 2000s, and yet were mistakenly believed to have one of the best.  But, even with a Park Factor that large, the difference remains one of degree and not kind.  While the cumulative effect of a PF of 125 leads to the kind of mis-evaluation that makes Neifi Perez look like an actual Major League baseball player, that is only because the baseball season is 162 games long, and because the actual difference between Albert Pujols and, say, Aaron Miles is much, much, much, much smaller than we usually believe.*  Another way of reading, then, that Park Factor of 125 is this: teams that would score 4 runs a game elsewhere scored 5 at Coors.  Suddenly that doesn't seem nearly so insane as the narrative of "hitter's paradise" made it sound.

* While Pujols certainly hits more homers than scrappy middle infielders, and by a long shot, his unreal career high in Wins Above Replacement is 10.9.  That's epically, historically great.  It's also 11 wins out of 162 games, or about 6.8% of the season.  I'll let you decide: difference in kind, or difference in degree?

Once our narratives have been constructed, we reinforce them with the stainless steel of confirmation bias.  When the Mets come from behind by four in the bottom of the ninth at Shea Stadium (or their new digs, Citi Field), we think of it as a great comeback.  When the Rockies come from behind by four in the bottom of the ninth at Coors, we think of it as Coors Field up to its old tricks.  A 12-11 slugfest at Kauffman Stadium in Kansas City is the result of bad outings from both teams' pitching staffs.  A 12-11 slugfest at Coors Field is the result of the absurd ballpark.  The special category of "Coors Field" explains and is the cause of all offense in the Mile High City, while elsewhere it's just normal baseball.

Now don't get me wrong, and allow me to reiterate my point one more time.  Coors Field does matter.  It used to inflate scoring by 25%, and now inflates scoring by 15%.  The Rockies, on the whole, will come from behind to win in the bottom of the ninth more often than other teams.  But only very, very slightly more often.  The difference is one of degree: the Rockies will score 23 late inning runs for every 20 that a comparable offensive team scores, thanks to playing at Coors.  The problem is, our narratives, our categories, our confirmation biases all conspire to make every single run we see at Coors a product of the park, and not of the million other things that go on in a baseball game.

But wait, I'm not done yet.  We can apply the same logic to steroids (gasp).  While there may be a categorical difference between Barry Bonds, All Time Home Run Champion and Barry Bonds, Great Hitter, we tend to forget that we don't even know exactly how many extra home runs Bonds hit because he used steroids.  And we can't know.  What's more, we don't know who else benefited, and to what degree.  What we do know, however, is that the easiest thing to do is to look at the picture and to discount any player who had a peak season during the "steroid era" as a "cheater," whose whole body of offensive work is attributable exclusively to his steroid use.  Rather than imagining that steroids help a player become X% better, we see steroids as being the difference between "good" and "bad," or "great" and "good."  We can't even begin to suppose, in our absolutist narrative, that Bonds may well have hit 700+ home runs even without steroids.  No, every single home run he mashed is tainted, cheap, unfair.  They categorically, absolutely, definitively do not count.

Is that right, though?  My answer is no.  Of course the steroids issue is a big deal precisely because we do not and cannot know exactly what the effect is, but to imagine that the effect is categorical instead of incremental is absurd.  Even if players hit twice as many home runs because of steroids, they didn't hit infinitely times as many.  And I think that would be easier to accept if our categories hadn't also been violated.  Barry Bonds is not merely a guy who hit X% more homers, but rather is the Home Run King, both in terms of career and single season jacks.  Those categories carry far more weight for us than numbers do.

To return to where we started, there's a good reason we think in categories instead of increments, kind instead of degree.  It helps us survive.  It's better to assume that the unusual ripple in the tall grass we see is dangerous (it might be a tiger) than to assume that said ripple is only marginally more pronounced than usual.  In nature, nuance leads to destruction.  That's no excuse to turn away from more nuanced thinking, however.  If anything, it's an exhortation towards the opposite.  That we like to see things as either categorically good or categorically bad makes us easy to persuade and, as a result, hoodwink.  If, for example, a politician speaks eloquently to our absolutist moral sensibilities, we're quick to cast our vote in his favor.  In the process, we forget that the difference between him and his opposition might not be categorical, but rather incremental, that there are perhaps a range of (non-linear) possible solutions to any given problem instead of two diametrically opposite ones.

The narrative of absolute, dichotomous categories is an extremely dangerous one exactly because it is beautiful.  Coors Field as "hitter's haven," human beings as fundamentally good (or bad, as the debate goes), politicians as liberal or conservative, such characterizations make it easier to think, easier to live, easier to write.  Poetry may owe itself to complexity, but on some level it also owes itself to simplicity: without a sense of Good and Evil, Joy and Misery, how do we understand No Second Troy?  Without the narrative of great plays or bad ones, how do we appreciate an unrepeatable Tulowitzki play in the hole?*  The possibility that the narrative value of categories is ultimately empty - of a kind of brute, practical use, but devoid of substantial, metaphysical meaning - is what drives the anti-statistics crowd of baseball fans mad.  The reliance upon and manipulation of categories is what makes so many religions so powerful, and - along with hefty doses of confirmation bias - it is what makes Fox News and MSNBC so persuasive to so many Americans.

* Another little pun for which I will not apologize.

Ah, there I go breaking my own rules.  You see, I too am talking in categories, in differences in kind instead of degree.  The notion of diametric opposites, the need for clear categories like Good and Bad cannot be, if we are to challenge it, innately and fundamentally Bad.  To say so would undermine the argument.  The problem is, every single word we read is a category, every single idea a kind of absolute.  We can deconstruct and deconstruct, and then reconstruct and reconstruct, and what we'll end up with is words that stand for something, some category.  Words that can never be truly specific, for true specificity would require a new word every second, every thought, every sentence.  Communication, as much as miscommunication, is built on categories.

So what is there to do?  Uncomfortable though it may be, I believe it remains useful to deconstruct, to analyze, to see where differences of kind actually are differences in degree, even though every difference is, in the end, actually both.  To my mind, we do not need to destroy the narratives of politics, religion, morality, or, most importantly (of course), baseball.  We need, instead, to dive into them, to see where they come from and why, and then to reconstruct them in some new form so that we can once again communicate.  Analysis and synthesis stand together, it turns out.  Like any set of supposed opposites, they actually are more alike than disparate.  Is there an endpoint to all of this analyzing and synthesizing, a point at which narrative and myth turn into Truth?  Maybe, but probably not.  Instead, it seems to me that the very act of trying to understand, of insisting upon being a learner, an asker of questions, a thinker, a skeptic (though we might also insist on being ignorant, a provider of answers, allowed to zone out, and a believer) is at the heart of what it is to be human.

More Humidor!

My last post ended up being oddly prophetic, as Tim Lincecum 'caught' the evil Rockies cheating just this last home series.  Apparently he - or the Rockies - didn't read the post, which concluded that cheating by mixing in non-humidor balls would be, basically, a colossal waste of the Rockies' time and energy.  Anyway, if the Rockies were cheating, it didn't do a lot of good, as the team lost 2 of 3 and are now all-but-eliminated from the NL West race.  Maybe next year they'll start cheating earlier in the season, instead of just in September.

In all seriousness, I want to further explore this humidor-cheating theme.  The charge against my favorite team is, frankly, extremely severe, and if there is any warrant for it, I'd like to know.  If, on the other hand, this is a witch-hunt that has more to do with irrational fears and the human propensity for finding patterns where there aren't any, well, I'd like to know that too.

Whereas last time we looked at theory - and theory flatly rejected the notion that the Rockies would gain from cheating by mixing non-humidor balls in with humidor balls - today we're going to look at data.  Now, because the theory says that the Rockies would get little to no benefit from cheating as described, what we have to look at instead is whether or not the Rockies have been unduly lucky.  Do they, in short, win more late comebacks than other teams?

Lets start with the most basic stats - and this includes both home and road games.  The Rockies have come back to win 29 games this season.  They have, on the other hand, blown 39 leads.  They have won 10 walk-off games, and have watched the other team walk off 9 times.*  Neither of those numbers looks particularly suspicious - indeed, it's the 39 (!) blown leads that are surprisingly high, apparently the Rockies are forgetting to take the non-humidor balls out when they go back to the mound - but let's dig deeper anyway.

* For comparison's sake, let's also look at the San Francisco Giants, the Rockies division rival who seems most convinced that the Rockies cheat with the humidor.  The Giants have won 35 games by comeback, and have lost 22 games in which they had a lead.  They have 6 walk-off wins and 5 walk-off losses.

Another informative statistic here is the 2010 Rockies record when they are behind at the start of the Xth inning.  Consider:

Behind to start the 2nd: 10-19, .345
3rd: 10-29, .256
4th: 11-39, .220
5th: 11-43, .204
6th: 12-48, .200
7th: 15-51, .227
8th: 10-54, .156
9th: 3-56, .051

The same table for the 2010 Giants.
2nd:  11-21, .344
3rd: 14-28, .333
4th: 14-37, .275
5th: 15-47, .242
6th: 12-55, .179
7th: 13-55, .191
8th: 8-57, .123
9th: 6-61, .090

This table in isolation, and even with a Giants version for comparison, isn't all that meaningful, so let's look at the MLB league-wide numbers as well.

2nd: 330-783, .296
3rd: 408-1115, .268
4th: 413-1325, .238
5th: 367-1518, .195
6th: 317-1640, .162
7th: 263-1757, .130
8th: 170-1892, .082
9th: 96-1999, .046

To summarize, the Giants have been better than the Rockies at coming back starting behind in the 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 9th innings.  The Rockies have been better coming from behind in the 2nd, 6th, 7th, and 8th.  Both teams have generally out-performed the rest of the league, which at least in part owes to the fact that both teams are above-average teams.  The Yankees, for example, are basically as good or better than both the Rockies and Giants coming from behind in every inning.  The Pirates are worse.  Makes sense.

I want to call out some particular numbers from the last chart.  The Rockies are 3-56 when trailing going into the 9th inning.  Three wins, 56 losses.  Sure, a lot of that has been on the road, but that 3-56 is way worse than the Giants 6-61, for example.  This more or less reinforces what we looked at last post: changing out humidor balls for non-humidor balls in the bottom of the ninth ain't gonna win many games.

In case you're not convinced, here are some numbers from previous seasons. In 2009 the Rockies went 2-63 (for an awesome .031 winning percentage) in games they trailed going into the ninth inning, and 4-58 in games they trailed going into the 8th.  In 2008 those numbers were 3-79 and 8-74 respectively.  Even in the magical 2007 the Rockies went 6-62 in games they trailed going into the 9th, almost identical to this year's Giants.

I don't want to spend forever parsing these numbers, because we'll just get the same thing over and over.  If baseball-reference made it easier, I'd pull these apart and separate home and road, but what we'd find is that the Rockies come from behind and blow leads more often at home, simply because Coors Field is such a good hitters park.  Remember that the Rockies have blown 39 leads this year? That's not because of a bad bullpen, indeed, far from it. The Colorado bullpen has been worth, according to fangraphs, 50 runs above replacement this year (or 5 wins), good for 5th in all of Major League Baseball.  I think that 39 blown leads has a lot to do with where the Rockies play, humidor balls or no.

"OK Mr. Smarty-pants," you're probably saying, "You've given me all kinds of mediocre data that doesn't show that the Rockies aren't cheating, and you've yet to supply an alternative hypothesis." On the first point, you're right.  I can't prove the Rockies aren't cheating because, as my last post said, there's no real reason to believe that the kind of cheating in question would actually benefit the team.  Instead, I'm trying to show, in this post, that there's not really a compelling reason to even suspect that the Rockies are cheating in the first place.  They don't win an inordinate number of comeback victories and they don't score an inordinate number of late runs (once you account for Coors Field, that is; I didn't show this data, but I did look, and if you ask nicely and really care, I will).  In short, they're not better than anyone else at winning games that they don't lead.

Now, as to your second point, I do have a hypothesis for why the Rockies have such extreme home/road splits.  I don't think the humidor has anything to do with it, rather, I think there are a couple things at work.  One is familiarity.  Every team in the Majors plays better at home than on the road, for any number of reasons that no one is quite sure about.  Sleeping in your own bed, a batter's eye you're used to, a mound that feels more comfortable... Whatever.  It just happens.  So it's no surprise that Rockies pitchers do better than those from other teams at Coors, and likewise it's no surprise that Rockies hitters benefit more from Coors than visiting hitters.  They know the park better, they're used to the way the ball breaks (or doesn't) out of the pitcher's hand, and they got a better night's sleep.

Beyond even that, though, I think the Rockies front office has figured out what kind of players play best at Coors Field.  Especially on the pitching end, the Rockies have a particular skill set they seem to target, and they seek a lot of castaways from other teams (Jorge De La Rosa, Jason Hammel, Huston Street, Manny Delcarmen, etc) and try to turn them into Coors Field specialists.  What is that skill set?  Hard to say, but I can point you to some numbers that I find interesting.

There are a lot of numbers we can look at, here, but I think the most informative ones are strikeouts and walks.  As two of the "three true outcomes," strikeouts and walks are the numbers that should be least susceptible to the altitude and cavernous alleys of Coors Field.  That's not to say Coors should have no effect on strikeouts and walks, but rather that the effect shouldn't be as big as it is on batting average or home runs.

So what do we see?  Rockies hitters have, as of today, 3016 Plate Appearances at Coors and 2959 on the road.  In those, Rockies hitters have struck out 555 times at home and 655 on the road.  In rates, the Rockies lineup strikes out 18.4% of the time at home, and 22.1% of the time on the road.  That's a pretty substantial difference.

What about walks?  The Rockies have drawn 288 walks at home and 274 on the road.  In rates, again, that's 9.5% at home and 9.3% on the road.  This is not, it seems to me, a substantial difference.  The strikeouts are telling, however, especially if you consider this amazing piece from Athletics Nation about Carlos Gonzalez.  It seems to me that the Rockies are probably taking more or less the same approach on the road as they do at home, but they're getting fooled by a lot more pitches - and especially fastballs, if you read the Cargo article - away from Coors.

More interesting, however, is the Rockies pitching staff.  At Coors, Rockies pitchers have faced 2988 hitters, while facing 2847 on the road.  At Coors, Rockies pitchers have struck out 596 hitters, while they've k-ed 577 on the road.  That's 19.9% of plate appearances turning into strikeouts at home, and 20.3% out on the road.  Not a substantial difference, which might owe to the kinds of pitches that Rockies pitchers throw.  Namely, they rely on the kinds of pitches that are least effected by the altitude and dry air at Coors.

Here's the really interesting thing, though.  Rockies pitchers have walked 217, or 7.3% of hitters at home, while walking 279, or 9.8% of hitters on the road.  That is definitely a significant difference, and while I think it's impossible - or at least beyond the scope of this post - to figure out why exactly that's happening, I strongly suspect it has something to do with the way that balls break differently when the Rockies aren't at altitude.  If, as the Cargo piece suggests, it's fastballs that are most effected, it stands to reason that more of those 3-2 and 3-1 (fastball) counts are turning into walks on the road than at home.

That's just speculation, but the point is not to prove anything, as I've said.  The point is to show that there's a perfectly reasonable - and much less conspiratorial - explanation for the Rockies huge home-road splits than "LOLCOORZ" and "OMGHUMIDORZ."  Given that the Rockies have been merely average - if not worse - at coming from behind in the last few years, and given that cheating with humidor balls is theoretically close to useless, and given that the Rockies front office is probably trying to build a team that capitalizes on the advantages of Coors Field...  Given all of those things, it takes a particularly hysterical and extremely cynical kind of person to believe that the Rockies are getting away with some awful sin against the sanctity of baseball.*

*O.K.  That's the end of the post unless you're a Rockies fan.  If you are, then feel free to read on to the part where I shed any semblance of objectivity and rant for a few sentences.  Enjoy.

So, yes, Tim Lincecum, you and your namby-pamby cry-baby Giants (and your awful, bourgeois Silicon Valley fans, and your too-good-for-everyone-else ballpark*) have officially made it to the top of my baseball hate list.  Higher than the Dodgers, higher than the Yankees.  Even higher than the Red Sox.  Congratulations.

* The cheapest seat at AT&T is $16!  And what kind of baseball stadium sells sushi and has wireless Internet access?  And I thought baseball was supposed to be for everyone.  Give me a $4 Rockpile seat any day.

Forgetting Coors Field

In what is quickly becoming a disappointing season for the Colorado Rockies, I'm somewhat surprised by the insistence in the (rather limited) Rockies blogosphere that the team's problem is an inability to hit on the road.  Granted, that much seems obvious, given the .301/.373/.492 line the offense puts up at Coors Field and the .232/.306/.364 line on the road.  There's no question, looking at those numbers, that the Rockies can't can't can't hit on the road.  A .306 OBP anywhere from your worst hitter is atrociously bad, let alone from your entire roster.

Consider the other teams road slashes in the NL West, for comparison:

Arizona Diamondbacks - .255/.339/.419
San Francisco Giants - .256/.325/.397
Los Angeles Dodgers - .256/.325/.382
San Diego Padres - .244/.304/.377

Amazingly, the Padres, despite playing in Petco Park, are hitting significantly better at home (.258/.339/.380) this year than on the road.  The unlikely success of San Diego this season has a great many sources, not the least of which is the magical transformation of Petco into a hitter's paradise for Padres players, whilst remaining one of the stingiest pitcher's parks for opposing hitters.

Anyway, it's clear from this list that the Rockies are quite poor on the road, but it is true that all of those teams have the benefit of playing a substantial number of their away games at Coors Field, so lets look at the NL East, too.

Philadelphia Phillies - .257/.328/.394
Atlanta Braves - .248/.334/.380
Florida Marlins - .256/.314/.410
Washington Nationals - .239/.307/.375
New York Mets - .240/.295/.366

 The Phillies have been much better than you would think, given all the doom-and-gloom talk about their offense this season.  Other than that, what stands out most here is that the Mets and Nationals, who no one picked to win the World Series this offseason, are the only teams with road splits as woefully bad (or, in the Mets case, worse) than the Rockies.

We might as well do the NL Central, too.

Milwaukee Brewers - .271/.339/.436
Cincinnati Reds - .264/.322/.414
St. Louis Cardinals - .260/.315/.405
Chicago Cubs - .252/.314/.396
Houston Astros - .244/.304/.344
Pittsburgh Pirates - .232/.289/.351

The Brewers offense jumps out at you, but their woeful pitching is the other side of the story, and the reason for their disappointing season so far.  The Pirates are truly awful, even though they certainly played the Rockies tough recently.

All told, Colorado clocks in with a tie for last in road batting average (with Pittsburgh), at 12th out of 16 in road OBP, and at 14th out of 16 in road SLG.  So the Rockies problem is definitely that they can't hit on the road.  I buy it.

But I also think this is a case where the hypothesis - that the Rockies can't hit on the road - is only a part of the whole story.  "Can't hit on the road" is a subset of the broader statement, "can't hit."  The Rockies, I would argue, can't hit on the road because they can't hit, period.  This is one of the very worst offensive teams in baseball.  Only a spectacularly good pitching staff and a set of mediocre talents particularly well adapted to playing at Coors Field keep the team slightly above .500.

Coors Field.  That's the real issue here.  I was one of the first people on the "Coors Field is no longer an absurd bandbox" train back when the humidor was put in place in 2002.  I fear, however, that the pendulum has swung too far back in the other direction.  Many Rockies fans (and announcers, I'm unhappy to report) seem convinced that Coors plays like any other park.  It doesn't.  It's still the best hitters park in baseball by a longshot, and that continues to make a mediocre-to-poor offense, like the Rockies have always had, seem good.

Coming into today, the Rockies are fourth in the NL in runs scored at 543.  Fourth, even though they are one of the worst road hitting teams in the National League.  Now the question is, are the Rockies inordinately unlucky on the road, or is Coors Field just that good of a hitter's park?

Unfortunately, "Park Factors" are calculated, primarily, by comparing home and road splits, so to say that Coors Field has a high park factor is to say that the Rockies hit better at home.  Park factor does account for visiting teams as well, but we might simply write off that influence as insignificant, certainly over the course of a single season, compared to the influence of the Rockies roster construction.

Nevertheless, we might begin to suspect that Coors Field really is a good hitter's park if it is consistently the best or one of the best hitter's parks in baseball.  Over time, sure, there still might be some luck involved, but the influence of visiting teams in the calculation feels more substantial, and over multiple seasons the sample size gets large enough that something systematic is going on.

So what has the Coors Field park factor looked like since the first year of the humidor?  It's higher than you might think.*

* I'm using the standard, ESPN "runs" Park Factor here.  Basically, a number of, say, 1.5, means that 1.5 times as many runs are scored at Coors compared to an average ballpark.

2002: 1.440, 1st in MLB
2003: 1.243, 5th in MLB
2004: 1.412, 1st in MLB
2005: 1.276, 2nd in MLB
2006: 1.149, 2nd in MLB
2007: 1.160, 3rd in MLB
2008: 1.126, 3rd in MLB
2009: 1.247, 1st in MLB
2010: 1.275, 1st in MLB

There are a few things to notice here.  First of all, Coors Field has always been in the top 5, and usually in the top 2 hitter's parks in baseball in any given season.  Even as league-wide scoring has gone down, and scoring at Coors with it, the home of the Rockies continues to rank near the top in MLB.  Coors Field, regardless of how much it has calmed down with the addition of the humidor, is still a hitter's paradise.

Also worth note here is that a park factor around 1.2 can seriously muddle simple metrics like "runs scored."  The Rockies, as mentioned above, are fourth in the NL with 543 runs this season.  If, however, we factor in that the Rockies have played 55 home games, and that those games inflate scoring by 1.275, we can roughly scale the Rockies actual production down to 485 runs or so if they played at a neutral park.  Lo and behold, that would put the Rockies 12th in the National League.

A final statistic worth looking at here - and we've done it before on this blog - is WAR.  Fangraphs has the Rockies offense (and defense) at 13.8 Wins this season, good for 16th in baseball (they adjust for DHs, so comparing across leagues is fair).  The Rockies pitching has been worth 17.4 Wins, good for 2nd in the entirety of MLB.  The problem is, hitting and defense together account for more of a team's success than pitching, so that 16th outweighs, unfortunately, the 2nd.  That's why you see a 59-55 record.

It's easy to think that the Rockies have the pieces in place to compete offensively, especially because of how lauded the lineup is in the local media.  But we forget that players who look good at Coors are merely average elsewhere, that near-MVPs like Matt Holliday turn into marginal All-Stars on other teams, that Neifi Perez looked like a passable Major Leaguer playing in Colorado.  That is still true for today's Rockies.

Troy Tulowitzki and Carlos Gonzalez are the Rockies best offensive players, but neither is a world beater.  The CarGo for MVP talk is nonsense.  Even with his recent surge, he is 21st in WAR in the National League, almost 2 full wins worse than the NL's best position player this season, Joey Votto.  In fact, "Little Pony" has been only the third best outfielder in the NL West, according to WAR, so far this season (behind the incredibly underrated Andres Torres and Chris Young).  Gonzalez is a good player, but Coors makes him look better than he is.

The same can be said of Tulo, who is incredibly valuable by default as a slick fielding shortshop.  That he hits a little is just a bonus, but just because he rakes on the Rockies doesn't mean he hits more than a little.  He's no Chase Utley.  One can only imagine what a player like that could do at Coors for 81 games a season.

It is true that, with the exception of Tod Helton, who has had an atrocious season, no one hitter on the Rockies right now is particularly bad.  But no one is particularly good either.  When your best offensive player doesn't know how to draw a walk and is 21st in WAR in the league, you're not likely to score a lot of runs unless you play at an extreme hitter's park.  The same could be said for when four of your regulars are producing at approximately replacement level (Helton, Spilborghs, Hawpe, and Mora).  Without offense, even a team with great pitching like the Rockies is doomed to mediocrity.

The point of this post, though, is not to write a post-mortem of the Rockies season.  We all know that anything is possible, and while it's unlikely that Colorado will catch all of the teams in front of them, stranger things have happened.  No, the point here is to remind fans of the Rockies - and really any team - that the raw numbers you see don't tell the whole story.  The Rockies score a lot of runs, but not because they have a good offense.  Rather, Coors Field is the culprit.