5/1/2019

Son Of A Handy Guide to the Future

That was certainly one Handy Guide, wasn’t it? This one is even handier, at least for those who like more details.

Thanks to the late Larry Zuckerman’s meticulously-researched book, Ballparks of the Pacific Coast League, we have loads of PCL park data from the ’30’s/’40’s/’50’s. We don’t quite have complete data, but we have a lot, and we will use whatever statistics are available to us to attempt to re-create these ballparks and their effects in OOTP.

In the first chart below I have taken the actual league totals for the PCL for the years 1938-1957 and adjusted it to approximately 154 games per year. “Approximately” because teams didn’t all play the same number of games every year (rain outs were often not made up) and “154 games” because that’s what we play in the Redux (the real PCL wasn’t consistent in the amount of games they scheduled, and sometimes teams played over 200 in a season). This chart will give you an idea of what to expect in upcoming seasons with regards to whether it was a big hitters’ year, or a big year for home runs, etc. A quick scan of the chart will reveal that home runs rose and dropped dramatically throughout these years. The totals are what I will set the LTMs (League Totals Modifiers) in OOTP to achieve each season.

The other chart shows adjusted park factors for the years 1935-1953. These are the factors I will input into OOTP. They are not the actual historical park factors for each individual year; they are based on averages over a longer period. Each time a team moved or the dimensions of one or more parks changed, all the league’s park factors change (since a park’s factors, by definition, are a comparison to the other parks in a league). If nothing changed in any of the parks from one year to the next, the factors stay the same until there was a change in one of the parks. I believe that using averages from several seasons, rather than implicitly trusting that a park’s actual effects on statistics really changes radically from year to year, makes park factors more accurate in cases when the parks have not been altered.

Actual PCL season totals, adjusted to actual MLB season (approx. 154 games/team)

Yearly PCL park factors (adjusted)

More essays

Home