Minor League Park Factors, Winners and Losers

Using our recently released park factors, which players look better or worse than their raw stats may show from 2022?

Last week, I introduced minor league park factors to the site. The goal is to adjust our view of a player’s performance, depending on the types of ballparks in which they played. Where minor leaguers play their games has a significant effect on their raw statistical totals, which makes it tougher to evaluate the true skill of a player.

Today, I want to provide a quick look at which hitters benefitted or were hindered by their parks over the past season.

Before we get started, I wanted to point out one takeaway from our park factors research: the difference between the most and least advantageous parks varies by hit type. As you can see in the table below, home run totals change the most between parks, whereas singles have the smallest spread.

Given the large effect a park can have on a hitter’s home run production, I wanted to look at which players benefitted or were hurt the most by the park they were playing in, specifically as it relates to home runs.

In the tables above, we compare a player’s actual home run percentage (defined as home runs divided by plate appearances) to their adjusted home run percentage based on park factors. The Diff% column shows the difference between those two percentages. As you can see, the park a player plays in can roughly affect their raw totals by a maximum of around 1%.

Matt Davidson appears to be the player who benefitted the most from playing in homer-happy parks, while Elijah Cabell took the biggest hit based on his playing fields.

The plot below shows how tight the spread is between the raw home run percentage and park adjusted home run percentage. The further a player’s black dot is from the red line, the more they were affected by the parks they played in, either negatively or positively.