Examining 2023 Minor League Park Factors

Plus an update on games from the Arizona Fall League

Prior to the start of the season, I wrote a piece on how to estimate park factors for the minor leagues. Adjusting a player’s production to take into consideration the ballpark they play in is one way to understand how a player may have performed had they played in a less (or more) advantageous environment. Now that the 2023 season is in the books, here is an update on what those park effects looked like this year. We’ll also look at which leagues have the most hitter and pitcher friendly parks and examine a few hitters to see how the parks they played in affected their performance this year.

To start, let’s take a look at the extremes, and see which parks were at the top and bottom for run scoring and home run hitting this past year (higher values are more hitter friendly).

As you can see, there’s a noticeable difference between the most offense friendly parks and the most defense friendly. If you hit 20 home runs in a neutral ballpark, that would be like hitting 25 homers in Amarillo, or 15 in Modesto. That’s a pretty big difference.

Now that we have an idea of which teams have the most extreme ball parks, let’s take a look at how the average ball park in each league plays.