RFK Stadium 2005
By Paul Coffey - Contributing Writer
01/03/2006
This article attempts to determine the 2005 SOMBB ball park effects for RFK stadium. Currently the stadium is being used by the Washington Nationals until the Washington D.C. council can negotiate lease terms and/or finance the building of a new facility to house the Nationals. I will not pretend to know a wealth of information and will leave it to the reader to do his or her own research. Here is one of the best websites for baseball stadium news:
http://www.ballparks.com/baseball/index.htm
While the negotiating and haggling continues it must be noted that this team is still owned by the 29 other MLB baseball teams. The stadium is also home to the D.C. United soccer team. With all this being said, we will avoid what future implications all this has on the stadium going forward and direct our attention to how Strat-O-Matic treats the ball park effects for the 2005 season.
Specifically, we will attempt to figure out what the ball park singles and ballpark homeruns will be for the Washington Nationals for the 2005 season. The stadium is one of the biggest ballparks in baseball. The left-field and right-field lines are 335 feet away from home, center field is 410 feet and the power alleys are purportedly 380 feet.
Early on there was much speculation by the players that the ball park played bigger than what was marked. Two Washington Post reporters had validated this by taking an unofficial measurement which prompted the team to do an actual measurement. It comes to find that "according to club officials, the actual distance -- measured with a laser -- to the mark that said "380" in left-center field was 394.74 feet; the actual distance to the "380" mark in right-center was 395 feet."
Suffice it to say, amid much player debate, RFK stadium was playing very much like a pitcher's park. In order to validate this and to calculate what the ratings are for SOMBB, we will utilize the park indices 2006 Bill James Handbook.
It is my opinion that SOMBB uses the rolling three years (2003-2005) of Bill James analysis or something very close in nature. This is a composite survey of all thirty parks for the past five years:
As you can clearly see there has never been much fluctuation in aggregate. So on average the RH (right hander homerun) was a 1-9 out of 20 in 2004. I decreased the 2005 expected based on the new pitcher park (RFK instead of Hiram/Olympic) and a down year in the home runs (why, I can only speculate).
The exact scores I cannot divulge as I have not gotten permission to use the figures that Bill James publishes, but the LH homerun was slightly below average and the RH homerun was significantly below average. Both batting averages were moderately below average.
SOMBB does take into account the symmetrical ball parks and sometimes blends the LH and RH rates to smooth out any anomalies. Because we have no prior basis, we can only speculate if SOMBB blends the RH and LH results or keeps them intact based on the one year of current history at RFK stadium.
In my opinion, the split results were pretty significant and I see the ball park playing very closely to Cleveland Stadium. I see ball park singles as only 1-3. The lefty homerun will probably come in as a 1-6 (perhaps 1-7) and a righty home run as a 1-3 (possibly 1-2).