New stadium groupings NOW LIVE for the 2023 Tour

We have made massive changes to the Stadium Groupings to take effect for the 2023 tournament. Approx 34% of the stadiums were moved to a different grouping. Right now, the board is signing off on it and final tweaks are being made. Board member MonkeyMaker (Kevin Rogers) did all of the heavy lifing and was also in colloboration with Hack Wilson and the underlying "goal" dictated to them by myself.

The "goal" was to set baselines for when the difference between the lefty/righty Singles/Home Run numbers would change the park's category. In the past, many parks appeared to be mis categorized. That was all on me. Now, every park will be in it's proper place based on calculations and criteria. Home Run listings of the ballpark will weigh heavier than it used to be. If SOM adds new ballparks to ATG, we will no longer have to guess where they should go.

These new groupings will be published soon after the entire board gives the thumbs up sign.

Moose

Way to go Mighty Moose, Monkey Maker and all of you on the Barnstormers Board!

Thank you and Happy New Year!

Gilbo

Happy New Year !

The 2023 stadium groupings have now been posted, along with another thread for what stadiums were changed. The goal here is to have every stadium dropped in place due to calculations instead of an opinion.

Stadiums have SINGLES and HOME RUN numbers given to them by SOM. We calculate SINGLES at 1 point and HOME RUNS at 4 points. (Think BASES) First and foremost is the LEFTY/RIGHTY - DIFFERENCE which is set at 30. If a ballpark does not have a 30 or greater DIFFERENCE then the ballpark is evaluated by TOTAL NUMBER OF POINTS to fit it into the other 5 main categories.

To give an example that came up in a discussion among the Barnstormers Board

STARS PARK (NeL) is 16-19-12-19

Breakdown 12x4 = 48 19x4 = 76 / difference is 28 which is below the Lefty/Right number of 30. But when the singles dfference is added in (16 vs 19) then that adds 3 more and the difference becomes 28 plus 3 = 31. Which put it's in the RIGHTY category. If the difference was LESS than 30 then calculations would be:

16+19+12x4+19x4 = 159 and that is "Moderate Hitting" - right on the EDGE of Extreme Hitting.

Crosley '48 works in exactly the same way. (10-7-19-12)

Extreme Hitting Parks are the FEWEST and we believe rightly so that an Extreme Hitting park in the real world is an anomaly. You still have 15 to choose from.

Criteria

Extreme Pitchers <41 total value
Moderate Pitchers 41-80
Neutral 81-115
Moderate Hitter 116-159
Extreme Hitter 160+
Lefty +30 Lefty value
Righty +30 Righty Value

We believe that every park is now categorized correctly based on numbers. - The entire Barnstormers Board of Directors signed off on the new stadium groupings after healthy discussions. The heavy lifting and spreadsheet work was done by MonkeyMaker.

Thanks for your continued ongoing Barnstormers Tournament support.

Coming soon, the wrapup of the Semi-Finals and the forming of the Championship Finals with Live Draft.

After the Champions League is launched, signups for the 2023 Tour begins with Event 1 normally scheduled around MLB first games.

This is a fair method and I appreciate the transparency. I like the new groupings and they're going to prompt me to try out some new parks. Being a giant nerd, I have a note to offer, in case it's helpful the next time you're revising the groupings.

Home runs are worth 3x as much as singles in terms of runs. But because ballpark singles are twice as common as ballpark homers, if you want to model the actual run environments that result from the park factors, BPSI should be worth 2 and BPHR should be worth 3. (Thanks to barrmorris for correcting my original figures.)

I'm also unclear on why the extreme hitting group is so much smaller than all the others. I'm not objecting, would just be curious to hear more about the thinking there.

I appreciate the feedback. I am not a big math guy, but I can usually follow along if there are examples. Could you please explain in detail how you came up with those figures. One of the other board members made a point that was somewhat along the same lines but I wanted to be able to quantify the decision.

Also, the smaller group of extreme parks was mostly a result of trying to find numbers that made the best sense based on the singles = 1 and homers =4 formula.

The number did seem small, but on reflection it does seem indicative of historical tendencies. We agreed there didn't seem to be as many extreme hitters parks throughout history as compared to other groups.

For, I would say all or almost all of the board members, we felt that there were some parks that felt like they were in wrong grouping but adjusting the criteria resulted in having parks that were definitely in the wrong group.

I don't remember all of the adjustments at this point. We started this process a few years ago then with COVID and trying to get the changes agreed on before the next tour ... It took a while...

Hope that helped.

Not sure where you come up with HR worth 3x single when clearly you get 4 bases. Taken directly from MLB.com - "While batting average is calculated by dividing the total number of hits by the total number of at-bats, the formula for slugging percentage is: (1B + 2Bx2 + 3Bx3 + HRx4)/AB"

We will never use YOUR databases just as when you claimed the "most popular" cap clearly was corrected directly through a SOM representative.

I see nothing in MaxPower's statement that indicates a change is needed to our stadium criteria.

MM

I appreciate the feedback. I am not a big math guy, but I can usually follow along if there are examples. Could you please explain in detail how you came up with those figures. One of the other board members made a point that was somewhat along the same lines but I wanted to be able to quantify the decision.

Sure, they were based on a database of 400 ATG9 leagues. I calculated the average runs per game for each cap/DH, then how far from average each individual team was. Then I used a linear regression to find how the home park factors predicted runs above average, and the computer spit out a coefficient for singles that was 1.5x times larger than the HR coefficient. I'm not really a math guy either so I'm definitely open to improvements/corrections if someone else wants to take a crack at it. Database can be found here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... K6jHR93wk/

This is a very interesting analysis. I used to be a math guy - now I'm just a paper pusher, but I have some questions - how did you handle the RH and LH ratings for each park? Did you sum them and then fit the deviation from average against the sum? This might not work too well for extreme parks and the teams that play in them.

This analysis ignores a lot variables which may possibly even out across many leagues, e.g. team construction and opponents ballparks.When you did the fit, did you get a value for the correlation coefficients and what were they? One idea that might take out some of the uncertainties about parks would be to fit the overall runs in each league with parameters for singles and BPHRs instead of individual teams.

Not sure where you come up with HR worth 3x single when clearly you get 4 bases. Taken directly from MLB.com - "While batting average is calculated by dividing the total number of hits by the total number of at-bats, the formula for slugging percentage is: (1B + 2Bx2 + 3Bx3 + HRx4)/AB"

Thanks Moose, I'm familiar with slugging percentage. I was talking about run values. The average homer is worth 1.44 runs whereas the average single is worth 0.48 runs. https://tht.fangraphs.com/why-woba-works/

We will never use YOUR databases

Suit yourselves, I don't care either way, just trying to be helpful. If someone wanted to run a similar analysis on just tournament leagues I expect they'd get similar results.

Having reasonable objective criteria is progress even if we can debate the exact formula. Good work fellas.

I discovered the Jarry Park issue while double checking everything. Memorial '78 we had listed as 1-1-6-5 - it's actually 4-4-4-4. Doesn't change the grouping for Memorial. Jarry '71 is a Lefty Park. Jarry '75 is Moderate Hitting. Jarry Park closed in 1976.