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.

Unfathomable Anabolic Cheating in the 100th Degree

Observing humans swing bats in the effort to hit leather balls effectively and having swung a few bats myself with the intention of launching leather spheres great distances, I have to agree with the notion that the Art of Hittin' is a skill more than a display of strength.

I see arguments on the internet that due to Hittin' being more of an art than a display of strength that players who used steroids should be allowed in the Hall of Fame. This is taking that argument to an extreme and that statement is not correct. To say that steroids do not improve the performance of a player is not correct by any stretch of that argument.

Mechanics of Hittin'

These are the skills a human needs in order to employ the Art of Hittin' effectively:

1. Hand-eye coordination
2. Bat Speed
3. Strength

The following factors are what determines how far the ball will go:

1. Location on bat the ball makes contact with ("sweet-zone" preferably)
2. Speed of swing (how fast the human swung the bat)
3. Weight of the bat  (all results show that heavier is not better)

With math, the factors can be synthesized to find the ideal conditions for hitting (relative to the hitting style of the individual player).

Weight of the bat can be thrown out as being important. The velocity of a batted ball will be increased off of a heavier bat, yet the loss of bat speed seems to be too high a price to pay in return. Every test from articles online seems to show that getting the bat to be lighter is to the advantage of the hitter. That's why "corked" bats have come under scrutiny over the years, it's considered cheating to make a bat super light but it's not considered cheating to use a 60+ ounce bat. Lighter is better, 100%. Being a muscular dude on steroids does not help you at all because swinging heavier bats is not very important overall.

Hand-eye coordination and the location the ball makes contact with on the bat go hand-in-hand. The hitter wants the ball to hit the "sweet-zone" of the barrel for optimum contact. This has nothing to do with muscles and strength but has everything to do with vision and coordination of the self.

So far it's looking like steroids wouldn't help a hitter at all, like people seem to be saying, but let's move on to bat-speed.

Bat Speed

Bat Speed is how fast the individual gets the bat through the box. This is really where physics comes into play. As mentioned above, getting a nice light bat to zip through the box lightning fast at an incoming pitch is where you generate the real velocity.

There's a lot of research online but I'm going to be mostly using this source for bat-speed physics: http://www.acs.psu.edu/drussell/bats/batw8.html (to avoid citing like a million sources every five seconds)

Players in the majors these days are clocking bat speeds of over 100 miles per hour. Once a player has the fundamentals of hittin' under his belt (hand-eye, judging the strike zone, patience, etc.) it all boils down to bat speed. Players with fast swings can wait a split-second longer to judge whether it's a pitch they want to hit and when they apply the fast swing unto the ball at the sweet-zone ...the velocity of the ball will be determined mainly by the speed of the swing.

This is where your physique comes into play. Bat Speed is generated by a well-grounded and powerful lower body. You ever see Jeff Bagwell for instance? He kinda looked like he was taking a dump while sitting on a toilet while he batted. He was just focusing the power of his body into his legs to build up a tremendous center of gravity into his oncoming swing. Look at his hands in the clip I linked to ("taking a dump") they are mobile and loose, his hands and arms are meant to swiftly get through the box, all the power is generated from his legs, feet, and stomach.

That being said, do players with muscular builds focused on their lower half, generate faster swings? Yes. The question being brought up here is, would steroids increase bat speed? Yes!

From twigs to tree trunks. Thanks steroids!

Most people take steroids to get big arms and flex for chicks. We're used to associating steroids with big arms, and since people know that arms don't play a major role in a players swing, they conclude that steroids don't aid a hitter. You can't rush to conclusions though. Look at Barry Bonds' legs...they almost doubled in mass in 15 years. It's not his arms you should be thinking about...it's his legs!

More leg and lower body mass will generate faster swings. That's a proven fact, steroids without a doubt effects the physical aspects of a human's lower body.

Wait There's More

Humans have a natural cycle. They are born, they grow into adults, they hit their prime-time peaks, then they wither and die. That's life, bro.

In baseball, most players lose their shit at some point, all humans do. When you hit your mid-thirties you naturally lose your physical stature. Your hair starts to turn grey, your body starts feeling like lead, you have trouble getting out of bed after a long day's work. That's normal.

Well, unless you are on steroids. You can counter the effects of aging by juicing yourself up with artificial hormone tonics and anabolic elixirs. Let's look at Bonds' career stats now...

Remember I told you that ALL players decline in ability when they hit their mid-thirties? I guess Barry didn't feel like declining like a regular human. Barry instead felt like pumping so many chemicals into his body to bring him into overdrive and turn his decline years into....oh come on. If anyone on earth believes that chemicals didn't enhance this person's level of play, they are nuts. Who hits their prime-time peak at 36-37-38-39? No one.

Bonds was already a Hall of Famer thanks to his natural peak (when he still looked human at the ages of 27 to 32). When he pumped himself full of hazardous chemicals to get a second prime-peak when he should have been declining is absurd, those stats from 2000 to 2004 are absurd.

Are They really even Bad for You though?

The only thing possible to argue now in favor of steroids is an argument such as...

"So what if they made themselves into over-sized hitting machines. Steroids aren't even that bad for you. Good for them for taking them, I think they are good role models for every aspiring athlete who wants to win at all costs."

I don't agree with that at all. All drugs which alter the physiological balances of your body must be used with caution. Drugs can save lives and cure many ailments, but they are not danger-free...and they are by no means things you should use recreationally or to alter your body.

Here are some side-effects associated with steroid abuse:

1. Horrible acne
2. Reduced sperm production
3. Raisin balls/Raisin dick (your testicles or weiner start to look like dried up raisins)
4. Man breasts (altered hormone levels throw everything out of whack)
5. High blood pressure (your heart goes into overdrive to deal with your body)
6. Liver damage (like any other chemical that goes into your body, the liver has to clean it up)
7. Enlarged prostates (even in teenagers which no one ever thought they'd see)
8. Chicks can start looking and talking like dudes (again hormones go out of whack)
9. Aggression (roid rage, again due to hormones being out of whack)
10. Stunted growth in kids (let your body have it's growth cycle, don't interfere with it)

If you argue that it was a good idea for these guys to take steroids for the good of the game, you're not on the right path. Baseball players were my role models as kids and I feel that they probably play a similar role today. What kind of message is it to send kids that steroids are ok?

I don't know how many kids are messing with steroids, but honestly, you'd much rather have your kids messing with weed and beer than you would want them messing with these chems. Steroids will alter their normal growth patterns, throw their hormones out of whack, and cause a myriad of issues with teens.

Conclusion

I do not believe that anyone confirmed to be a steroid abuser should be in the baseball Hall of Fame.

If you think that steroids does not enhance a hitter's performance...you are incorrect. Steroids enhance a hitter's performance and postpone the natural cycle of aging.

If you think that steroids are good for you and think anyone who wants to should use them, then I do not agree with you at all. There's too many risks involved, and it sends a terrible message to young people. It really is not a good idea for young people (or anyone) to abuse these chemicals.

Steroids is not a miracle drug that makes you all-powerful and immortal...steroid abuse will ultimately catch up to you. The overdrive your putting on your heart to keep up with your roided-up physique will take a good 20 years off of your life. The overall mass of the body and heart problems are correlated. It's a curse more than a blessing to be a huge hunk of meat...your heart will not be able to sustain your body into the ages of 50, 60, and over.

The most important and vital tools in the human body are the brain and the heart...not the biceps and the cavs.

'Roids