Archive of SportingNews.com's old SOM Baseball forum

Lot of talk about gaining home field advantage, which field lends itself the best to that?

Contrary to popular belief, if I can get ARod, I'm hell to beat in Coors.:wink:

To be honest I should have voted Minute Maid, with this years' set that's probably truthfully the biggest HFA.

IMO, the biggest HFA park is not listed up above.

... anyone care to guess???

In my experience, it would be The Cell.

The Cell indeed. In my experience too 8)

The Cell gets my vote also.

why the cell?

I said Petco largely because the majority of owners tend toward parks that amp up hitting.

My logic has been this:[list:263dfb051a][*:263dfb051a]Most people are trying very hard to draft good starting pitching.[*:263dfb051a]Therefore, trying to draft an excellent rotation is a good way to end up with a mediocre rotation and not much else besides.[*:263dfb051a]Therefore, it'd be best to figure out a way to win with cheap starting pitchers who are not much in demand.[*:263dfb051a]The cheap low-WHIP/high HR guys available look better to me than the cheap high-WHIP/low HR guys available.[*:263dfb051a]Therefore, I've been playing in pitchers' parks.[/list:u:263dfb051a]

Roscodog, I like to think of The Cell as a very elliptical pitcher's park disguised as a homer park. As such, it's much easier to build an effective- and sometimes killer- pitching staff that will hold up on the road in all those Petcos, SAFECOs and such a lot better than a pure pitcher's park staff, with all of their attendant BPHRs will hold up at The Cell. It takes some experimentation, but I find it a great deal easier to assemble a pitching staff at The Cell from guys no one else will draft highly, which allows me to nab some primo hitting earlier on draft cards. Without giving away all the goodies, the pitchers who suit The Cell have more things in common than simply not having BP homers on their cards-- and those things really tend to stymie most pitchers park teams, and the more extreme the pitching park lineup, the better.

The thing about The Cell for efficacious team hitting follows my disguised homer park philosophy, too-- high OBP guys count here. Not just power guys. And speed doesn't necessarily help you here, either. I'm don't go out of my way to build a Cell team with a bunch of slugs to snail along the basepaths, but having a lardo slugger isn't going to hurt me, as it would in Petco, for instance. Generally, The Cell gives managers a flexibility which enables them to plan-- if your draft goes well-- for any contingency. When you take all of this (and more) into consideration, the home field advantage it holds for a well-formed team can be enormous-- especially given the way many other good teams are built to suit their parks.