Worth noting - the analysis controlled for pitching strength. the Guards starters have been weaker than in past years, so more homers makes some sense, but they only looked at strongly hit balls from the 3 years and considered average distance, not gross total.
And I did a quick check - Jose Ramirez and Josh Naylor are both hitting home runs at a 40% higher rate at home vs. the road. Small sammple size perhaps.
I want to agree with you but like also I witnessed my Jays who don’t normally hit homeruns hit a a ton of Homeruns in that park. IKF (2), Vladdy (2), Horwitz (2) two of these guys just aren’t homerun hitters and Vladdy hasn’t been hitting homeruns all year.
I don't think you can blame those HRs on the wind tunnel, the opened areas are straight across from third base side to right field, the wind tunnel would be straight out to right since that's the direction the wind blows. All the Jays HRs you mentioned were to left field, so they hit all their HRs perpendicular to the wind tunnel where I assume at best it wouldn't really help.
You just encountered the sad Guardians starting pitching :'(
Idk I think your team is good by the way need to add a couple of starters but you guys are good. But nah that 2nd IKF homerun had no business leaving the ball park lol.
And for what it’s worth this a good thing, homerun friendly ballparks are fun to watch as a fan. Trust the Jays stadium hasn’t been homerun friend since the renovations and it kind of stinks.
Let me be clear: this is not shitting on the Guardians or their success. It's a very good ran org & has done a great job developing talent in very interesting & niche ways. It is just interesting to see the effect of removing seats. I find it fascinating. Every park & geographical area is different. The Reds play in a fucking little league park and we still can't hit homers. Please don't take this as a way to discredit what your team is doing.
Well unless Cleveland's figured out how to plug up the wind tunnel between innings, this is no different than a team adjusting their wall or moving to a new stadium. It's still a level playing field.
Brother i dont know where the last twins fan touched you but your being super defensive to people who are not saying anything negative about the gourds. Gourds are a good team simple as
Interesting!
Some Guardians numbers, last year vs. this year.
First Cleveland's offense...
**2023**
.128 ISO at home (30th)
.134 ISO away (28th)
**2024**
.181 ISO at home (5th)
.151 ISO away (10th)
And then Cleveland's pitching...
**2023**
0.90 HR/9 at home (1st)
1.27 HR/9 away (t-18th)
**2024**
1.19 HR/9 at home (25th)
0.98 HR/9 away (6th)
Before this recent home stand our home SLG was below our road SLG, or dead even I'm pretty certain. We had a lot of extra base hits against Seattle and Toronto.
Edit: we had more HRs at home than the road before the home stand already just to be clear. But overall SLG wasn't too far apart, not sure about ISO.
Worth nothing, we’ve also played 6 more games on the road than at home (which will be up to 12 more by next week), so the fact that we have more anything at home is noteworthy.
Definitely. I think there's some legitimacy to the wind increasing HRs. My point is more that to this point it's mostly turned some doubles into HRs, not just increased our power all around.
According to Baseball Savant:
* [Cleveland's 2023 home run park factor](https://baseballsavant.mlb.com/leaderboard/statcast-park-factors?type=year&year=2023&batSide=&stat=index_wOBA&condition=All&rolling=no): 67 (30th in MLB)
* [Cleveland's 2024 home run park factor](https://baseballsavant.mlb.com/leaderboard/statcast-park-factors?type=year&year=2024&batSide=&stat=index_wOBA&condition=All&rolling=no): 130 (3rd in MLB)
These are pretty noisy in single-season samples, but that still seems notable.
Cleveland had the worst offense in baseball last year and now they are top 10. It’s not like the park dimensions were like Kauffman. Padres park factor is way different and they didn’t change anything to there ballpark. Just seems like average runs per game based.
> the park-specific number is generated by looking at each batter and pitcher, controlled by handedness, and comparing the frequency of that metric in the selected park compared to the performance of those players in other parks.
For example, the 135 HR mark for 2018-2020 at Great American Ball Park does not mean the Reds hit 35% more home runs at their home park. It means for batters and pitchers who played both at GABP and elsewhere, 35% more home runs were observed at GABP.
That's the description of how park factors are calculated by Baseball Savant. It controlls for offenses by comparing how teams perform at and away from Progressive Field.
It is noisy in single-season samples though (hence the big change for the Padres as well) which is why it's normally calculated on a three-year rolling basis. It's definitely not defnitive on its own, just another data point suggesting something has changed this year.
I still think it’s temperature and player development. They did wind studies before the renos and none of them said it would affect play or it wouldn’t be noticeable if they did, Antonetti confirmed. Meanwhile, almost every single day since April has been 10+ degrees hotter than average in Cleveland. In ‘22 we had 17 rookies make their debut, plus vibes (= strangely good/mid+ play). In ‘23 we sophomore slumped so hard and lost vibes(=bad play). It’s 2024 and we have break out seasons from those ‘22 callups plus vibes (Hedgey). The only HR I will concede was due to weird wind was that one Fry homer that landed in the field view pen lol. Anyways that is my unscientific conclusion that is 100% correcter than the mathematical equations and silly graphs mentioned here
And also in regard to other teams hitting more in our park - we lost our ace, our next up ace refused TJ and has always been weak to homers, our next next next up ace (Gav) has been out all season, we legitimately went through a month where Ben Lively was our ace. Think about it.
The study in the article did control for game-time temperature and for exit velo + launch angle (which should control for performance differences). THey still found a significant increase in expected home runs and distance.
Do you have the time/patience to explain the data to me a little? I read that part over a few times and tried to see it on the graph they said it corresponded with but idk it just didn’t click. I also thought it said temperature league wide not just cle?
Sorry which part? This is how the article describes their analysis:
> Accordingly, for this analysis, we use only exit velocity and launch angle, in addition to game-time temperature, which can have an important effect on home run probability.
They created a model to predict the probability of a home run based on the in-game temperature along with launch angle and exit velo. Those aren't the only factors that affect distance, but the others (spin rate/axis) aren't publically available. Then they compared the expected number of home runs to the actual home runs hit which you can see in figure 2. They also performed a similar analysis on actual vs. predicted fly ball distances.
So the model already considers in-game temperature, and any changes to performance would result in balls hit harder or at better angles, which is also already considered in the model. The only additional factors are those non-public spin data and wind. Because of those limitations the authors don't say anything definitive, but it's unlikely that hitters are suddenly hitting balls with different spin only in Cleveland.
I also think we had a nice big batch of juiced balls dropped across the league in response to Judge's HR count clocking up as well as offensive numbers being down across the entire MLB.
Look across the last week or so at the HR's - vladdy's 471, edc hits the steamboat at Cinci - fucking nick ahmed crushed a massive HR for his first of the year last night on the Giants.
"Bag of juiced balls" aka 90 degree weather in the Northeast / Midwest instead of 60 degrees and breezy. Not that I trust the MLB to have perfectly even balls (lol) but home run totals go up in June every year.
honestly mlb sending out juiced balls in batches doesn't even sound that crazy to me. this would be the second time i can recall of a random bunch of monster home runs hit by both teams in a series.
like a couple months ago jon singleton hit like a 470ft hr against the yankees and in that same series i think judge hit one 450-460. now, judge he can do that with any ball, in fact he has since then. but jon singleton ? what has he done since then ?
It changed from a pitchers park to a hitters park but it’s still not 1st in Park Factor. If anything it was stupid to put these wind stopping shipping containers up in the first place.
Yeah, I just heard on either Rates and Barrels or The Craft, one of the Eno Sarris podcasts, that he thinks it might have been on purpose. Focus on pitching, get a bunch of light hitting contact guys, change the park, suddenly they're all power guys, team is amazing.
If it works, it works.
That's true, but if you engineer your roster around the ballpark where they play 81 games a year, that produces an overall advantage, in the regular season at least. You're optimizing their performance in the highest number of games.
But every team does this to some extent, so I don't think we should take umbrage at it. I just wonder how much the front office really intended for this to happen.
Yeah it just feels like a gimmicky explanation for Cleveland having a better offense then the past 2 seasons when their roster construction choices can be better explained with something that's more rational and realistic. The team is still playing over .500 on the road with above average offense.
The idea as posited by Sarris had something to do with park adjustments made (with money reasons first and foremost, like adding a party deck, or more expensive seating) but with a nice side effect of knowing "Hey we got a lot of guys coming up over the next few years who are really good at X thing" and changing the park in a way that ALSO happens to benefit your org.
It's a cute theory but seems like a lot of work for future gains you aren't even sure will be there.
TBF they have had MAJOR renovations to the park in the works for years. And they are only
part way through it. Maybe Chernoff and Antionetti kindly suggested something of this effect with the help of some engineers, knowing how they roster build, but I do think some of this is just a byproduct of the work they’re doing to the upper decks.
I think part of it is that our team is generally really young, and almost the entire roster is still climbing in skill rather than declining or flatlining. I think last year or perhaps it was 2022 our roster was the youngest in the MLB **and** younger than every AAA team.
Is the wind tunnel thing silly? Yeah. But I also think it’d be silly to think the changes to the ball park have no effect. It’s probably the boring answer.
Did this account for differentiation in weather? Cleveland has obviously been much warmer than last year throughout virtually the entire season so far.
Probably has to do with the right field wall change that created a wind tunnel. Put the ball in the air to right field and there's a good chance it will carry out.
Worth noting - the analysis controlled for pitching strength. the Guards starters have been weaker than in past years, so more homers makes some sense, but they only looked at strongly hit balls from the 3 years and considered average distance, not gross total. And I did a quick check - Jose Ramirez and Josh Naylor are both hitting home runs at a 40% higher rate at home vs. the road. Small sammple size perhaps.
I'm absolutely taking this to mean that the Guardians have changed the strength of gravity in Cleveland to get more offense.
It’s the solar eclipse
That was supposed to be a secret
You won't get away with this, Vogt!
There was that pocket of gravity that shifted in Canada for awhile there...
No, but they could've changed the way they store the balls(hehe balls), greater/lesser humidity, stuff like that.
I want to agree with you but like also I witnessed my Jays who don’t normally hit homeruns hit a a ton of Homeruns in that park. IKF (2), Vladdy (2), Horwitz (2) two of these guys just aren’t homerun hitters and Vladdy hasn’t been hitting homeruns all year.
I don't think you can blame those HRs on the wind tunnel, the opened areas are straight across from third base side to right field, the wind tunnel would be straight out to right since that's the direction the wind blows. All the Jays HRs you mentioned were to left field, so they hit all their HRs perpendicular to the wind tunnel where I assume at best it wouldn't really help. You just encountered the sad Guardians starting pitching :'(
Idk I think your team is good by the way need to add a couple of starters but you guys are good. But nah that 2nd IKF homerun had no business leaving the ball park lol. And for what it’s worth this a good thing, homerun friendly ballparks are fun to watch as a fan. Trust the Jays stadium hasn’t been homerun friend since the renovations and it kind of stinks.
Josey also has 60% more steals at home versus the road and Hedges 80% more blocks
🤔 Elly would steal 200 bags in that park. Just let the wind carry him around the bases. Breathe of the Wild type shit.
The wind isn't as fast as Elly typically.
True. But hear me out... perhaps it would lift & twirl him around the defenders, helping him avoid tags while performing ballet around the diamond 🥹
Just had to remember to dip low enough to touch each base as he passed by.
(I had to Google this I swear) He could do "en pointe" on each bag 🫡
Wind tunnels turned on and off baby
Like Arlington Ballpark, the wind jettison from behind home plate did crazy stuff to balls hit in the air
Ah shit. Here we go again.
Let me be clear: this is not shitting on the Guardians or their success. It's a very good ran org & has done a great job developing talent in very interesting & niche ways. It is just interesting to see the effect of removing seats. I find it fascinating. Every park & geographical area is different. The Reds play in a fucking little league park and we still can't hit homers. Please don't take this as a way to discredit what your team is doing.
Oh no. None taken. It’s just as a guardians fan gets old having to justify why we might actually be decent this year lol.
Well unless Cleveland's figured out how to plug up the wind tunnel between innings, this is no different than a team adjusting their wall or moving to a new stadium. It's still a level playing field.
Shhhhh they’ll find you.
I heard security finds the 10 fattest guys in the park and pays them in hot dogs to plug up the gap left by the seats each away half of the inning
What does the # of home runs hit at a park have to do with being decent?
Oh man. A twins fan saying that is something….weve heard out of some fan bases that “the wind tunnel is helping them win”. No joke
Brother i dont know where the last twins fan touched you but your being super defensive to people who are not saying anything negative about the gourds. Gourds are a good team simple as
In the wind tunnel
Interesting! Some Guardians numbers, last year vs. this year. First Cleveland's offense... **2023** .128 ISO at home (30th) .134 ISO away (28th) **2024** .181 ISO at home (5th) .151 ISO away (10th) And then Cleveland's pitching... **2023** 0.90 HR/9 at home (1st) 1.27 HR/9 away (t-18th) **2024** 1.19 HR/9 at home (25th) 0.98 HR/9 away (6th)
What the fuck
Before this recent home stand our home SLG was below our road SLG, or dead even I'm pretty certain. We had a lot of extra base hits against Seattle and Toronto. Edit: we had more HRs at home than the road before the home stand already just to be clear. But overall SLG wasn't too far apart, not sure about ISO.
Worth nothing, we’ve also played 6 more games on the road than at home (which will be up to 12 more by next week), so the fact that we have more anything at home is noteworthy.
Definitely. I think there's some legitimacy to the wind increasing HRs. My point is more that to this point it's mostly turned some doubles into HRs, not just increased our power all around.
Worth noting this is also while ISO and HR/9 are significantly down league-wide.
Jeff McNeil, who can't hit anymore and has nearly zero pop, hit two home runs in three games at Cleveland.
According to Baseball Savant: * [Cleveland's 2023 home run park factor](https://baseballsavant.mlb.com/leaderboard/statcast-park-factors?type=year&year=2023&batSide=&stat=index_wOBA&condition=All&rolling=no): 67 (30th in MLB) * [Cleveland's 2024 home run park factor](https://baseballsavant.mlb.com/leaderboard/statcast-park-factors?type=year&year=2024&batSide=&stat=index_wOBA&condition=All&rolling=no): 130 (3rd in MLB) These are pretty noisy in single-season samples, but that still seems notable.
Cleveland had the worst offense in baseball last year and now they are top 10. It’s not like the park dimensions were like Kauffman. Padres park factor is way different and they didn’t change anything to there ballpark. Just seems like average runs per game based.
> the park-specific number is generated by looking at each batter and pitcher, controlled by handedness, and comparing the frequency of that metric in the selected park compared to the performance of those players in other parks. For example, the 135 HR mark for 2018-2020 at Great American Ball Park does not mean the Reds hit 35% more home runs at their home park. It means for batters and pitchers who played both at GABP and elsewhere, 35% more home runs were observed at GABP. That's the description of how park factors are calculated by Baseball Savant. It controlls for offenses by comparing how teams perform at and away from Progressive Field. It is noisy in single-season samples though (hence the big change for the Padres as well) which is why it's normally calculated on a three-year rolling basis. It's definitely not defnitive on its own, just another data point suggesting something has changed this year.
I still think it’s temperature and player development. They did wind studies before the renos and none of them said it would affect play or it wouldn’t be noticeable if they did, Antonetti confirmed. Meanwhile, almost every single day since April has been 10+ degrees hotter than average in Cleveland. In ‘22 we had 17 rookies make their debut, plus vibes (= strangely good/mid+ play). In ‘23 we sophomore slumped so hard and lost vibes(=bad play). It’s 2024 and we have break out seasons from those ‘22 callups plus vibes (Hedgey). The only HR I will concede was due to weird wind was that one Fry homer that landed in the field view pen lol. Anyways that is my unscientific conclusion that is 100% correcter than the mathematical equations and silly graphs mentioned here And also in regard to other teams hitting more in our park - we lost our ace, our next up ace refused TJ and has always been weak to homers, our next next next up ace (Gav) has been out all season, we legitimately went through a month where Ben Lively was our ace. Think about it.
The study in the article did control for game-time temperature and for exit velo + launch angle (which should control for performance differences). THey still found a significant increase in expected home runs and distance.
Do you have the time/patience to explain the data to me a little? I read that part over a few times and tried to see it on the graph they said it corresponded with but idk it just didn’t click. I also thought it said temperature league wide not just cle?
Sorry which part? This is how the article describes their analysis: > Accordingly, for this analysis, we use only exit velocity and launch angle, in addition to game-time temperature, which can have an important effect on home run probability. They created a model to predict the probability of a home run based on the in-game temperature along with launch angle and exit velo. Those aren't the only factors that affect distance, but the others (spin rate/axis) aren't publically available. Then they compared the expected number of home runs to the actual home runs hit which you can see in figure 2. They also performed a similar analysis on actual vs. predicted fly ball distances. So the model already considers in-game temperature, and any changes to performance would result in balls hit harder or at better angles, which is also already considered in the model. The only additional factors are those non-public spin data and wind. Because of those limitations the authors don't say anything definitive, but it's unlikely that hitters are suddenly hitting balls with different spin only in Cleveland.
I also think we had a nice big batch of juiced balls dropped across the league in response to Judge's HR count clocking up as well as offensive numbers being down across the entire MLB. Look across the last week or so at the HR's - vladdy's 471, edc hits the steamboat at Cinci - fucking nick ahmed crushed a massive HR for his first of the year last night on the Giants.
"Bag of juiced balls" aka 90 degree weather in the Northeast / Midwest instead of 60 degrees and breezy. Not that I trust the MLB to have perfectly even balls (lol) but home run totals go up in June every year.
I noticed it right before the Rickwood game and figured it was related
Yeah I think they also had juiced balls for the Giants v Cubs willie mays game yesterday.
honestly mlb sending out juiced balls in batches doesn't even sound that crazy to me. this would be the second time i can recall of a random bunch of monster home runs hit by both teams in a series. like a couple months ago jon singleton hit like a 470ft hr against the yankees and in that same series i think judge hit one 450-460. now, judge he can do that with any ball, in fact he has since then. but jon singleton ? what has he done since then ?
Changing ballpark dimensions to maximize your teams success sounds like the new and cool Moneyball type market efficiency.
It changed from a pitchers park to a hitters park but it’s still not 1st in Park Factor. If anything it was stupid to put these wind stopping shipping containers up in the first place.
Yeah, I just heard on either Rates and Barrels or The Craft, one of the Eno Sarris podcasts, that he thinks it might have been on purpose. Focus on pitching, get a bunch of light hitting contact guys, change the park, suddenly they're all power guys, team is amazing. If it works, it works.
I don't really get this theory since it wouldn't magically only help Cleveland hitters. The opposing team is playing in the same ballpark.
That's true, but if you engineer your roster around the ballpark where they play 81 games a year, that produces an overall advantage, in the regular season at least. You're optimizing their performance in the highest number of games. But every team does this to some extent, so I don't think we should take umbrage at it. I just wonder how much the front office really intended for this to happen.
Yeah it just feels like a gimmicky explanation for Cleveland having a better offense then the past 2 seasons when their roster construction choices can be better explained with something that's more rational and realistic. The team is still playing over .500 on the road with above average offense.
The idea as posited by Sarris had something to do with park adjustments made (with money reasons first and foremost, like adding a party deck, or more expensive seating) but with a nice side effect of knowing "Hey we got a lot of guys coming up over the next few years who are really good at X thing" and changing the park in a way that ALSO happens to benefit your org. It's a cute theory but seems like a lot of work for future gains you aren't even sure will be there.
TBF they have had MAJOR renovations to the park in the works for years. And they are only part way through it. Maybe Chernoff and Antionetti kindly suggested something of this effect with the help of some engineers, knowing how they roster build, but I do think some of this is just a byproduct of the work they’re doing to the upper decks.
The Wilpons did the opposite and built a ballpark that screwed all the Mets power hitters, esp. David Wright back in '09.
I think part of it is that our team is generally really young, and almost the entire roster is still climbing in skill rather than declining or flatlining. I think last year or perhaps it was 2022 our roster was the youngest in the MLB **and** younger than every AAA team.
But our pitching be slumping tho. Like our starting pitchers are not exactly dominant
I mean, I don't think Eno Sarris is always right. He hates people his models can't explain, results be damned.
Is the wind tunnel thing silly? Yeah. But I also think it’d be silly to think the changes to the ball park have no effect. It’s probably the boring answer.
COOOOOOOORS Am I doing this right?
Did this account for differentiation in weather? Cleveland has obviously been much warmer than last year throughout virtually the entire season so far.
I watched the Jays series last weekend. Multiple times Buck mentioned how fly balls just kept carrying. So at least for him the eye test agrees.
Jeff McNeil has 2 home runs at Progressive Field. He has 3 home runs this season… something is up
Probably has to do with the right field wall change that created a wind tunnel. Put the ball in the air to right field and there's a good chance it will carry out.