Eastern League Black Hole for Power: Dodd Stadium

As I tried to show in my post about Ishikawa, Connecticut's home park, Dodd Stadium, really kills HR hitting, enough that to properly assess any of the Giants prospects playing in Connecticut, you need to ignore their home performance in terms of HR and power, and concentrate solely on their road performance. A truer picture would be to take his home stats, reduce it to the same influence as any of the road teams (for example, one could scale down the home stats so that it equals one-eleventh of the AB or PA of his road stats and add that and examine that). However, that would be a pain to have to go and convert all the stats for the players in the league in that fashion. Besides, I'm only interested in the Giants prospects.

In this post, I'm just going to examine league-wide stats, team vs. team comparison against the league average. I think this will further make my case that Dodd Stadium kills power and distorts our Giant prospects hitting performance greatly.

SLG is Down Greatly

As one can see in this table, the SLG for Connecticut batters is much lower at home and yet is basically league average on the road:



As you can see, by scrolling down, despite being about league average on the road at 98%, their home SLG is the worse by far, at only 83% of the league average. The next lowest team is at 95% and 10 of the 12 teams range from 95% to 106%.

HR Power is Down Drastically

As I showed in my previous post, homers were down but this table will show how that worked team by team:



As I noted, homers drastically down, at 56% of the league average at home for the Connecticut Defenders. The next lowest was at 79% and 6 of 11 ranged from 86% to 102%. Again, on the road, the Defenders were slightly below average at 97%.

ISO Down Drastically Too

Same old story for ISO (which is SLG minus BA):




At home, Connecticut's power as measured by ISO was 69% of the league average. The next lowest was at 93%. The range for 8 of 11 was 95% to 106%, at home. They were actually above average on the road, at 104%.

XBH% is Below Too

Same story, just not as extreme:



At home, the percentage of extrabase hits for the Defenders was 85% of the league average. The next lowest was at 92%. 8 of 11 of the teams ranged from 94% to 104%.

Dodd is a Power Black Hole

So if there are still any non-believers after my Ishikawa post, hopefully after this post, they will see that Dodd Stadium horribly skews Giants hitting prospects stats and you cannot base any evaluation of their power hitting skills on their home stats. Basically, you need to go stat by stat, player by player, to see what makes sense to consider, their total stats or just their road stats.

That is why the Giants should just bite the bullet and pay to fix up the stadium (they might have been better off telling ESPN to blow off and go ahead and resod the field into the new configuration, instead of letting ESPN film whatever they were filming there. The lawsuit might have been cheaper to resolve with a settlement than paying to resod the field today). One, it makes it harder to evaluate not only your hitters but also your pitchers, who don't have to worry as much about getting hit upon at home. Two, this skewing might get our position players into bad habits, both hitting and pitching, as they deal with how this park hurts or helps them, statistically. Three, most importantly, it could negatively affect the confidence of the players, particularly the hitters, but even the pitchers, as they might be overconfident about their skills and then go and get killed when they go to AAA.

Dodd Stadium, as it is currently configured, must die!!!