Sunday, January 3, 2010

A neat new tool for examining a player's home run power


Capitol Avenue Club has developed a beta of a Ballpark Overlay Tool using Adobe Photoshop and player home run graphics from Hit Tracker Online. Since I use MS Paint just fine and don't have $200 sitting around for a redundant application that has a few extra features, I don't have Photoshop and thus I cannot use the tool. But it is neat to see if home runs hit in one player's home park would have landed for HRs in another park.

However, (and Daniel Moroz at Camden Crazies notes this as well) I wouldn't consider it a completely accurate tool for gauging how many HRs a player would hit somewhere else, because the depth of the fences is only one aspect that determines whether a ball leaves the yard or not. Wind resistance, humidity, altitude and other factors come into play with the environment, let alone the countless factors of the pitchers faced, how they would fare in the new home park compared to the incumbent park, whether the player would have different equipment with another team, how the new team does and how the coaching/management affect the player, IF it has any effect on said player's mindset. There's just so many variables to whether a player can crank HRs that you're better served just translating a player's career HR numbers with park factors and projecting it based on his flyball rates.

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