Matching Lineups & Staff to match your ballpark

[Yankee Clipper]

Hello Everyone,
I'm trying to figure out what type of hitters and pitchers do I want for my home field.
What are you looking to accomplish when constructing a line-up & rotation for your home field with the goal to have as much of a home field advantage as possible?

Hitters
I believe there are four types of hitters:
Normal
Spray
Pull
Extreme Pull

I believe there are five types of hitter profiles:
Flyball
Ground Ball
Line Drive
Normal
Line-Drive

I am assuming there are three types of ballparks:
Pitchers
Hitters
Normal

What is the premium match-up with regards to the three hitting factors; type, profile & park?
In a pitchers park the optimal type & profile hitter is?
In a hitters park the optimal type & profile hitter is?
In a normal park the optimal type of profile and hitter is?


Pitchers
For pitchers I found five types of pitcher:
Neutral
Ground Ball
Extreme Ground Ball
Flyball
Extreme Fly Ball

(The other stat is arm angle but I'm not sure if that matters at all or not.)

In a pitchers park the optimal type of pitcher is?
In a neutral park the optimal type of pitcher is?
In a hitters park the optimal type of pitcher is?

Does your strategy change depending on the pitchers role?
Do you prefer one type of pitcher for one role vs another? Ex. Starters I try to have this and closers this

In theory if the opposing pitcher was an extreme ground ball pitcher what would be the optimal batters profile? Flyball?

Do pull hitters or extreme pull hitters gain any benefits from any particular type of park or pitcher?

Is the line-drive hitter the one to covet the most? The least?

[pgconboy]

I recently did this with not much success.
I imported Polo Grounds as my home stadium and did a fantasy draft using all time rosters. I primarily drafted left handed hitters to try to capitalize on the short right field. Prince Fielder DH, David Ortiz 1st, Mel Ott in the field, etc. In the end my team has the 2nd most at bats and the fewest amount of home runs.

[BBGiovanni]

Originally Posted by pgconboy

I recently did this with not much success.
I imported Polo Grounds as my home stadium and did a fantasy draft using all time rosters. I primarily drafted left handed hitters to try to capitalize on the short right field. Prince Fielder DH, David Ortiz 1st, Mel Ott in the field, etc. In the end my team has the 2nd most at bats and the fewest amount of home runs.

The fence in LF was only 20 feet deeper than RF. More importantly, those are the measurements at the foul poles. The park was bathtub-shaped, so the fence ran basically straight out to the power alleys 475 or so feet out. The runway in CF was 480 or so feet. Thoss guys are probably mashing very long fly ball outs just like Vic Wertz in 1954.

http://www.andrewclem.com/Baseball/PoloGrounds.html

[BBGiovanni]

As to the OP, I prefer ground ball pitchers in general but I'm always more interested in the guys that get the most outs.

As for offense, I have an irrational like of fast gap-hitters as I tend to play teams in big/pitchers' ballparks and they seem to often be better on defense too.

[Timofmars]

If you go to the team Home screen, then settings, there is an Edit Ballpark button there. You can check your ballpark's modifiers there, as well as browse the other ballparks. I just tested making some changes to the ballpark dimensions, and it did not affect the ballpark factors, so I don't know if that means the ballpark dimensions are just for things like the PbP getting the homerun distances correct, or if it actually matters to the hitting outcomes in combination with the ballpark factors.

But you can see each park has a modifier for AVG LHB, AVG RHB, Doubles, Triples, HRs LHB, and HRs RHB. These are definitely used in the game.

I would guess these numbers basically act as a multiplier to a player's normal abilities. So LHB who would normally have a .050 chance of a homerun in a neutral ballpark would have a 0.45 chance of a homerun in a ballpark that has a 0.900 modifier to LHB HRs. So you can consider a LHB's power to be worth 10% less than normal for your home games, or maybe 5% less if you assume half the games will be away games, which should probably balance out to near neutral for those games. Or it might be a good idea to look at the ballparks of your division rivals and weight those more heavily, since you'll play there a lot more.

But I think the type of hitter, like line drive, flyball, etc. may not matter, because I think the player ratings are what is used to determine the outcome of the AB. I think the batted ball profile just affects what the ball trajectory looks like when playing out the games.

So instead of the batted ball profile, I would favor contact for a ballpark with a higher batter AVG, Gap for higher doubles/triples (maybe speed + gap for the triples), and Power for HRs, at least compared to how I would normally value those things. And if the park is just generally a pitchers park, then maybe eye gains favor by virtue of being unaffected by the ballpark factors, as well as speed for getting around the bases with less hit support.

For pitchers, again I don't think the pitcher type matters. The ratings already reflect the pitches. For example, a GB pitcher will have a better movement rating, and changing them in the editor to be a FB pitcher would bring down their movement rating a ton.

So for pitchers, I would say the 3 ratings become more or less important than usual based on what they stop. So in a park the has a HR bonus factor for batters, movement becomes more important for the pitcher, since I think it would end up preventing a larger number of HRs than usual. In a high batting AVG park, Stuff becomes more important because it does the most to stop hits (movement is 2nd there, and control is 3rd, according to my analyses). Stopping doubles and triples would seem to require the same abilities, or maybe favor a good outfield since they will have more opportunities to use their defense to make a difference. For a pitcher's park, I guess control becomes slightly more important, and maybe the pitcher's Hold Runners ability, and the catcher's arm, so runners can't steal their way into scoring position so easily.

I wouldn't go looking for players to fit your ballpark. Rather, I'd just keep looking for the best players I could get as always, and use park factors almost like a tiebreaker.

But it could be fun to play in a really weird ballpark, like one that is heavily biased against right handed hitters, and then try to get all lefty SPs who will have natural advantages against lefties, and park advantages against righties. And strongly favor getting lefty hitters for your lineup as well.

[Qeltar]

I had this idea the other day.. when I am bored with fixing Miami, take over the Rockies and build a staff full of power hitters and ground ball pitchers. See how it goes.

Playing MLB The Show's RTTS (RPG lite) I made a junkballing closer and he got traded to Colorado.. not any pitcher's dream transaction. But this guy was a sidearmer throwing sinkers, sliders, changeups... and a huge ground ball percentage. Almost every pitch at the knees and lower.

With no pitch over 90 he required pinpoint concentration but when used effectively he worked fine in Coors. Was kind of a neat experiment. Of course, ANY mistake was punished.. mercilessly.

Going to definitely try it here.

[Yankee Clipper]

Originally Posted by Timofmars

But I think the type of hitter, like line drive, flyball, etc. may not matter, because I think the player ratings are what is used to determine the outcome of the AB. I think the batted ball profile just affects what the ball trajectory looks like when playing out the games.

If this is true it would be very disheartening. Maybe some with some more information will come along?

[Matt Arnold]

Originally Posted by Yankee Clipper

If this is true it would be very disheartening. Maybe some with some more information will come along?

Yes and no to that. I mean, player profiles overall are fairly logical, so you're not going to see a "power hitter" whose stat line looks like Ichiro. And so a slap hitting player like him obviously won't see the gains that other guys would see playing in Coors Field, for example.

So if you want someone who might benefit from Coors, you can probably look for either a "power hitter" (ie. someone who will hit HR) or maybe a "flyball batter" (ie. someone who will tend to hit flyballs), since those are both generally speaking tied to the things that get a boost in Coors (ie. HR). But again, park factors are only one thing - unless if your ballpark is just insanely lopsided, guys like Judge are going to be hitting HR in them regardless.

[Yankee Clipper]

Originally Posted by Matt Arnold

Yes and no to that. I mean, player profiles overall are fairly logical, so you're not going to see a "power hitter" whose stat line looks like Ichiro. And so a slap hitting player like him obviously won't see the gains that other guys would see playing in Coors Field, for example.

So if you want someone who might benefit from Coors, you can probably look for either a "power hitter" (ie. someone who will hit HR) or maybe a "flyball batter" (ie. someone who will tend to hit flyballs), since those are both generally speaking tied to the things that get a boost in Coors (ie. HR). But again, park factors are only one thing - unless if your ballpark is just insanely lopsided, guys like Judge are going to be hitting HR in them regardless.

Thank you Mr. Arnold

Is there anyway to maximize a team to precisely fit their home ballpark?
Would a lineup of all fly ball hitters do better in Coors than a lineup filled with all ground ball hitters?
Would a staff of 12 extreme ground ball pitchers have better success in Coors compared to pitchers that were all fly ball pitchers? If all the other ratings were exactly the same?

Would a line drive hitter be more optimal in a stadium with high doubles and triples ratings?

[Syd Thrift]

So, I don't *think* the game engine currently takes whether a hitter is a spray or pull hitter into account when determining park factors just yet. It probably should but for non-fictional leagues this might wreak havoc with player ratings. For instance, you'd probably have to bump Ted Williams' power up even *more* to make up for the fact that he was a dead pull hitter who played his entire career in a park that was much nicer to right-handed hitters than to left-handed ones (then again, Fenway Park at the time *did* have a very short right field - just over 300 feet and I think that might have been a bit longer than it actually was - that bowed out pretty quickly to the alleys, but maybe Teddy Ballgame hit a lot of HRs down the line). At the same time, you'd probably have to smooth out the hitting profiles of spray hitters... although that raises the point, too, that power hitters tend to be pull hitters whereas spray hitters tend not to hit a lot of HRs. In fact, opposite field HRs were an extreme rarity until around the 1980s.

I'm interested to know how the game treats flyball hitters. With pitchers it's pretty obvious and I think the game does pretty well in terms of basically turning Movement into something akin to HR/FB. So for pitchers, yeah, in OOTP you could absolutely hide a homerun prone pitcher in a big park, at least half the time, and if there was a "solution" for Coors Field, it was to get a lot of guys who keep the ball down in the zone. For pitchers I don't think it's 100% "first determine if this player hits a fly, then see if it's hit out of the park" kind of thing but there's definitely a correlation. Anyway, I figured that the hitter rating was just something that applied to outs but apparently not, and this is what I get for thinking about a modern baseball game in Strat-O-Matic or APBA terms. Is the "Power" rating actually now something of a HR/FB rating itself? More ways in which a fictional league gets enhanced but more pitfalls for guys playing "historical" (which I put in quotes because, well, these still aren't real players).