It All Depends

With Yankee Stadium turning utility infielders into Babe Ruth, it's a good time to look at the importance of context. Fans and sportswriters have understood the concept of context in extreme situations, like Coors Field. But in more subtle cases, it all looks the same to them. That makes sense: I can tell Phyllis Diller from Jessica Alba, but Ashley Olsen could strip and dance the Monkey for me and I still wouldn't know her from Mary Kate. (Note to Ashley: it's nonetheless worth a try. I might be wrong.)

So far, baseballs are jumping out of the yard at about a 50% greater frequency at Yankee Stadium than at the average MLB park. It's not difficult to translate home runs across this environment; we can do that ourselves. Take a Yankee hitter who bops 25 home runs, 15 at home and 10 on the road. Assume for a second that he plays in an average collection of parks on the road. (It's an assumption that leaves us a few feet farther along the limb than we'd like to be considering the unbalanced schedule, but it actually won't affect the numbers much here.) Those 15 Bronx homers are the equivalent of 10 "average park" homers. Comparing this player to league norm, he's a 20-home-run hitter.

The same adjustments can be made for any stat in any stadium, as long as you know where a player plied his trade and how those ballparks affect offense. It would help you observe, for example, that while Raul Ibanez is raking like never before, he's played half his games in Citizens Bank, a known stat-expander, plus a series in the Bronx.

The same adjustment can be made across time as well, so that we can normalize Tony Oliva's pedestrian 1968 batting accomplishments of .289/.357/.477 with 18 homers and 68 RBI to an average year. Recall that 1968 was the Great Depression for offense, when the American League batting average was in the .230s. In fact, Oliva finished second to Yaz in the batting race, and when adjusted to the mean season his line looks like this: .315/.385/.569 with 26 homers and 87 RBI. Oliva was a legitimate mid-ballot MVP candidate.

Most parks and seasons walk the line more narrowly. Even Coors, post-humidor, pumps only about 10% more volume into batting stats. Offense stutters a few percent in Comerica and Telephone Company Field (S.F.); it sings a few percent louder in Fenway. If you're comparing Kevin Youklis to Miguel Cabrera, it can make a big difference that Youklis gains 15 points on his batting average and Cabrera loses 15 points because of his home park. It's important to account for these differences whenever we evaluate players.

By the way, I've greatly simplified the discussion. Some parks add doubles but bring back home runs. Some parks are pitching disasters during the day, but the wind blows differently at night. Lefties are advantaged at in some stadiums, but righties aren't, and so forth.

All of this leads naturally to Todd Helton, who recently notched his career's 2,000th hit. Helton has been a Rockie stalwart for a decade, an accomplished glove man at first and a power and average bat who gets on base with the regularity of a laxative commercial. His .329/.428/.573 slash stats with 316 dingers and 1146 RBI, stellar defense and more walks than strikeouts may be Hall-worthy under normal circumstances. But ordinary fans and baseball writers understand that his career has corresponded with a perfect storm of offensive conditions: the most offense-infused ball park in the most offense-infused era. Translating to normal, Helton's .297/.397/.513 line, 296 homers and 996 RBI don't get the knob turned on the door in Cooperstown, particularly when you account for a power brown-out in his 30s. Unless Helton can provide top-5 first base production into his 40s -- he's now 35 -- he'll be enshrined only in the Hall of Very Good. That will be one case where baseball writers can justifiably pat themselves on the back for understanding a nuance of the game.

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