On Park Factors and the Hinderance to Larry Walker's Hall of Fame Bid

Hall of Fame votin' season is getting into full swing, I did my annual Timmy "Rock" Raines for Hall of Fame article early this here,

Read that one: Here

Today we'll be looking at a player with a career .965 OPS (on base + slugging), which is unusually high, yet who's hall of fame bid is not garnering much support. This man is Larry Walker who was born in Maple Ridge British Colombia.

The reason for him not garnering a ground-swell of support hinges on the fact that he racked up insane numbers in a hitter's park...in fact the park which greatest favored hitters over pitchers of any park ever.

Park Factors

Park factors is a fairly new way of looking and interpreting baseball statistics. It is quite simple, it boils down to, some stadiums favor hitters and other stadiums favor pitchers. Many factors are at play some examples are the following:

1. How close are the outfield walls? If the corner of the outfields are 350 feet instead of 355 feet...it might sound like no big deal but that five feet means many a ball that would be home runs in the 350 park will be outs in the 355 park.

2. How big is the foul area? Some parks have huge in-play foul territories and some parks have very small foul territories. If a guy pops up to the third base side and it sails into the crowd...it becomes a souvenir for a fan rather than in the third baseman's glove and the third out of the inning. Large foul territories favor pitchers.

3. Is the infield grass or turf? A grass infield will slow the ball down and a sharp hit grounder will die out and be fielded by the infielder...while in a carpet park with turf many of these hard hit balls hit the hard ground surface, don't slow down, and wind up past the infielder and into the outfield for a hit.

Walker, in a rare right-handed at-bat

Those are examples of how a park could favor hitters or pitchers. In the case of Larry Walker a very new park factor came into play with the expansion Colorado team in 1993. It took a while to figure out why everyone on that team was hitting close to .400 and hitting 40 homers a year...but it was physicists who figured out as to why the hitters were getting such an undocumented boost and pitchers' ERAs were getting into the fives and sixes.

Scientists pointed out that the altitude of the stadium, which is a full mile above sea level, or around 1600 meters above sea level was making the air in the stadium less dense. Mountain climbers might be familiar with the gasping for air as they get higher and higher up a mountain, and this is the same case here. The air is simply not as thick when you're that high above sea-level.

Now, pitchers throw balls usually between 85-100 miles per hour and hitters nail these pitches with bat speeds coming through their centers of gravity at about 100 miles an hour...meaning when these two forces collide the ball off the bat will go quite far quite fast. If the air is thinner, the resistance of the air molecules that the traveling ball is meeting isn't posing much of a resistance at all. Not only that, but many breaking pitches need to push off dense air molecules to complete their breaks and if the air is too thin then, for example a curve-ball, will not break/move/drop on the hitter because it has nothing to break against.

Colorado has tried to curb the exaggerated effects of the boost to hitters over the years and the effects are not as exaggerated as they used to be (but it still is a VERY hitter friendly park). They now store the baseballs used in the games in a big humidor to make the balls more moisture-logged so they don't rip through the air as easily. Unfortunately, the era of 1993 to 2002 in Colorado and hitters hitting there have the stigma of "Mile-High Effect" on their stats, and Walker was a Colorado Rockie from 1995 to 2004, therefore, getting a good eight full season of the Mile-High boost.

Hall of Fame voters now don't know what the hell to do, no one knows what his numbers would have been without the boost and it seems for the most part they are all just not voting for him at all. It's unfortunate because chances are without the boost he may very well would have had a hall of fame career regardless.

Another Player who Benefited from Park Effects

Teams used to design their damned parks after their star players. If a big left handed hitter was their star player than possibly one year the right field wall would have "accidentally" been brought closer by about 20 feet. I read in Bill Veeck's book that, well he claims that, he installed an electric fence which went in closer while his team batted, and then at the push of a button, went out really far when the opposing team batted. There is no evidence of this ever happening and is accepted by historians as being a flat-out lie told by Veeck as more of a parlor jest than anything else.

Aided by Park Effects?

I don't want to cut into legends, everyone loves Babe Ruth, and his name has grown to be bigger than life itself...yet in defense of Larry Walker, I think we'll have to cut into the Babe a bit and detail just how easy it was for him to hit homers.

There's parks now and over the years where it is 345 to the corner outfields, some stand at 340...and then there's some where it is literally just above 300 feet. It is the older ball parks where this is the case, most people have seen the green monster in Boston which looks like a little league park it is so close to the hitter but at least they raised the wall to tower up and keep line drives from becoming homers. Yankee Stadium in Ruth's era had a right field wall which was 314 feet away and wasn't an over-exaggerated tower of a wall like in Boston....just a regular wall 314 feet away. That's it.

Ruth was a pull hitter who pulled the ball to right field, and at 314 feet away, guess what? Fat Boy logged a lot of fucking homeruns. Is it just me or does logging 714 homers while your home park custom built you a wall 314 feet away seem kind of cheap? No offense, I know the Babe is a legend, but F that cheap tailor made field for him, man. Revive this guy with some voodoo, put Babe Ruth in SafeCo Field down in Seattle as his home park, and watch this "legend" hit .275 with 22 homers next year.

That kid Kyle Seager who hit 16 homers at SafeCo last year should be pretty proud of himself. That's not an easy park to drop bombs in.

A lot of the old legends got the benefit of playing around in home parks where they were literally little league dimension fields. Home or away, they got to fool around in tiny little parks.

Conclusion

Did Larry Walker get his stats monstrously inflated from Coors Field? Yes, yes he did.

Those are his stats from the 1998 season for example, hitting .418 with 17 homers at home but only .302 with 6 homers on the road. That is highly irregular and not normal. To get a good idea what his stats would have been sans-Coors, someone should look at his career Away OPS, and see if it is still good. If his career Away OPS is still over 900 then I think he should be a shoe in Hall of Famer.

According to the data his career OPS on the road is .865...which is still very very good and possibly good enough for the Hall of Fame.

The thing is, the Hall of Fame is filled with players who's park effects weren't analyzed even a little bit. Should Walker get sort of a "grandfather clause" bypass because Coors Field was basically the field which made park factors such a well-studied phenomena? If Babe and all these other guys got their park factors thrown out the window then maybe Walker should too. He has the negative stigma of playing in the park which literally lead to such an interest in park factors...which is a huge stumbling block to his candidacy.

It's hard for anyone to imagine what his numbers would have been if they weren't altitude inflated...I'm not sure that is a license for all BBWAA writers to just toss his case out the window though. All in all, the design flaw of Coors field may keep him out of the hall of fame.

For what it is worth, I 100% fully believe, that if you took the 1920s Babe Ruth, you somehow cloned him or revived him with some hypothetical elixir, and stuck him a Mariners uniform (or a Padres uniform where it's 402 to right-center) for the 2015 season...1920s Babe Ruth would struggle to even hit .280 and not even make it to 30 homers in a full season. I truly believe that.

On Larry Walker (of the Montreal Expos)

Spring is here, and Warren Cromartie is on the radio and t.v. talkin' Expos so now I'm all happy today. I find I'm writing a lot about baseball again in the last little while (WBC, steroids, etc.). Baseball is something I like and it's nice and positive to write about it. I'm gonna try and write about more positive things (science, sports) in the future and try and stay away from politics. You get too negative when you get dragged into the drudges of the political world.

Larry Walker

I was listening to an interview on Mitch Melnick's TSN 690 radio program today and he was talkin' to Cro. The Cro was mentioning that his Montreal Baseball Project is well into Phase II as he is launching an economic forum/feasibility study, and he also mentioned that next year marks the 20th anniversary of the 1994 Montreal Expos team. Many know the history of that and really believe the disbanding of that squadron was the first step in the death of the Expos.

To mark the anniversary of the 1994 Expos, Montreal Baseball Project is re-uniting the team for some sort of festivity here in the city. He mentioned Pedro, Moises, Grip, Felipe, and others are gonna be part of it. I hope others show up too. Mitch asked him about Larry Walker and neither thought he would come. Cro proceeded to say that if anyone is in touch with Larry to call [him] homie, and let him know they want him there for the reunion.

Mitch mentioned that relations with Walker and Montreal are somewhat sour and I want to try and explain why that is.

Rabbit Ears

Warren mentioned that "players have rabbit ears" and I want to to try and elaborate on what he was saying.

Remember that episode of the Simpson's where Homer gets benched for Darryl Strawberry and Bart sits behind him in the rightfield stands and heckles the Straw until he sheds a single tear? That's rabbit ears.

In fact, Bart (or whichever writer wrote that bit) did not invent the "Dar-ryl" chant...fans at Fenway did (as evidenced by this video care of MLB.com):

Dar-ryyyyyyl, Dar-ryyyyyyyl.

Okay. Now, before moving on to how this relates to Larry Walker, I want to first talk about another Expos outfielder.

In the mid 1980s, the owners of each Major League club colluded to agree to not sign any free agents in order to drive their salaries down. Expos outfielder Andre Dawson left the Expos and signed a blank cheque with the Cubs. The fans had no way of knowing about the collusion that was going on, and when Dawson came to play against the Expos with the Cubs in 1987...the Expos fans booed him. The fans should have been booing the owners for colluding but with the information they had, they could only believe that Dawson jumped ship and thus they booed him under false pretenses.

Now, the same would occur in 1995...to one Larry Kenneth Robert Walker. After 1994, Claude Brochu dismantled the Expos following the cancelled season. Walker, Grissom, Wetteland, and others were traded or released. Larry Walker was let go and signed on with the Colorado Rockies. We now know that Walker wanted to take much less money to remain in Montreal but was still let go by the team in order to cut salaries. To the fans however, who had already been shafted out of a playoff berth for the first time in over a decade, were already understandably bitter and were very unfriendly to Larry when he came to Olympic Stadium to play against the Expos as a Rockie in the 1995 season. They booed the heck out of him, heckled him every at bat, and the fans in the right field bleachers gave him the Dar-yyyyl treatment something fierce.

So when Cro mentioned that "players have rabbit ears" that's what he was talking about. The fans gave Walker the Dar-yyyl treatment but who could blame them? Just like in 1987 when they booed Dawson, the fans had no idea of the back office politics going on which led to those players leaving the club. All they knew in '95 was that they just had their World Series contender team dismantled and were as bitter as hell. Once again the jeers were undeserved by the outfielder yet it is easy to see why the fans did it. How were they to know otherwise?

My sources for these two events are: I was present at the Walker "Dar-yyyl" game and very clearly remember the length and intensity of the jeers directed at Walker. While my source for the 1987 Dawson boos comes from a very reliable Expos historian (Wayne).

So,

The Walker and Montreal sourness is from a big misunderstanding by the fans, that's all. The 1995 season started on an incredibly sour note here and I don't think anyone can blame the fans for being pessimistic and quite angry that season.

It would be cool if Larry attends the Montreal Baseball Project's 1994 team reunion next summer.