Archive of SportingNews.com's old SOM Baseball forum

When reviewing the "how to read a players card" guide on SOM it indicates that ballpark singles result when the dice roll exceeds the range of the ballpark singles effect. Therefore, in Tiger Stadium, where the LH range is 1-2 it would be easy to get singles e.g. a roll of 3-20 is a single

HOwever, on the stadium card it indicates that the lower the rating the harder it is to get singles.

Which is accurate? Or more to the point, is it very easy or very difficult to get singles in Tiger stadium where the LH singles rating is 1-2 and RH is 1-1

Thanks

very difficult...

so ground ball pitcher is going to get a benefit. Singles hitters like Rod Carew will suffer.

no ... almost all pitchers are effected exactly the same way by the ballpark symbol. when it comes to singles you should look at the ">" symbol on the card, for both pitchers and hitters... those are the only readings that are effected by the ballpark rating. Almost every pitcher in the game has the same chance of having a ballpark effect come up. The ballpark single symbol usually appears on a 3 chance (4 and 10) and a 2 chance (3 and 11), allowing for 5 chances out of 108 total chances on one side of the card. There are some hitters and pitchers who have cards without BP singles on one or both sides. For example Sid Fernandez' 1990 card has no BP singles.

For the HR effect look at the "#" symbol on pitchers and hitters cards... The appearance of the "#" varies much more than the single effect.

Almost all Hitter and Pitchers have 10 > symbols on their cards (5 on a side). That means the BP single effect can happen 10/216 (5%) of the time. In a park like Tiger this 5% is nearly always an out because you only have a 5 or 10% chance of it being a hit. In Royals 80% of that 5% will result in hits. It seems small but over a season it adds up.

Figure 5500 AB/season * 5% = 275 AB. In Tiger 5% of those are hits (13 hits), and Royals 80% (220 hits). This mean 1.4 hits per player at Tiger on average and a lower BA, and 24 hits per player in Royals. Of couse this assumes all 12 ballparks are Royal and Tigers, but you can cut the number in half to see the home park effect.

Consider a lefty with 600 AB and a .250 hitter in a league where all park have a BP rating of 0. He would have 150 hits.

Put him in Tiger and add 600 * .05 * .1 = 3 hits. 153/600 = .255
Put him in Royals and add 600 * .05 * .8 = 24 hits 174/600 = .290

There is a reason the Royal's team have high averages. The same works for BP HR (#), but it that are not as evenly distributed.

The above example has some very broad assumptions, but is correct in theory. So Tiger good for pitchers bad for hitters

wow -- thanks for your help.