So far no effort has been made to evaluate park effects for Negro League teams, and given the sample size of our available information, this would probably prove fruitless anyway. For the most part defense must be judged solely on reputation.
--From David Marasco’s “Evaluating Negro Leaguers” FAQ, on the Baseball Archive site (the FAQ appears to have been originally produced for the rec.sport.baseball newsgroup).
As it happens, Negro League fielding statistics and park effects are two of my main interests. It’s unfair to single Marasco out, since he’s done some quality research on the Negro Leagues; but it is amazing just how many people fervently argue that there’s no point in compiling Negro Leagues statistics at all. Of course sample size is a major concern. I just don’t think you should declare the whole project hopeless without actually adding up the numbers and seeing what they look like.
Anyway: below is the first part of an analysis of Negro National League parks from 1920 through 1924, with 1928 thrown in (as I happened to have it sitting around).
This study follows on work I’ve already published at the Hall of Merit site, but with some important differences. Here, I’ve only included games against other league opponents. I have not included playoffs (in the case of 1928), or games against major eastern teams, such as the Bacharach Giants, or independent western teams, such as the Nashville Elite Giants.
1921, 1922, 1923, and 1928 have been thoroughly researched (1923 comes from Patrick Rock’s 1923 Negro National League Yearbook); there is still much work to do on 1920 and 1924.
What I’m presenting is very simple, even crude:
PF = Park Factor = runs per game (both teams) at home divided by runs per game (both teams) in that team's road games; a.k.a. home/road ratio. In American Giants’ games played in Schorling park in 1920, both teams together averaged 85 percent as many runs scored as both teams in American Giants’ road games, so their PF is 85.
APF = Adjusted Park Factor = PF adjusted by ratio of home games to road games. In 1920, the American Giants played 34 games at home, 20 on the road, so the park factor becomes 90 instead of 85.
In future posts, I’ll be addressing additional complexities, including the particular configuration of road parks a given team plays in, and how it affects their home park factors.
Here are the numbers:
PF, APF (home games, road + neutral site games)
Rickwood Field (Birmingham)
1924: 77, 95 (12, 40)
1928: 101, 100 (38, 56)
Schorling Park (Chicago)
1920: 85, 90 (34, 20)
1921: 47, 70 (38, 28)
1922: 67, 79 (39, 23)
1923: 74, 85 (43, 30)
1924: 94, 95 (54, 19)
1928: 60, 72 (66, 28)
Redland Field (Cincinnati)
1921: 109, 103 (23, 45)
Tate Field (Cleveland)
1922: 102, 101 (24, 12)
1924: 90, 96 (15, 19)
Luna Park (Cleveland)
1928: 141, 119 (37, 42)
Neil Park (Columbus)
1921: 123, 111 (34, 36)
Ducks Park (Dayton)
1920: 101, 100 (3, 18)
Mack Park (Detroit)
1920: 121, 116 (51, 15)
1921: 101, 100 (38, 24)
1922: 120, 113 (48, 25)
1923: 79, 86 (43, 24)
1924: 139, 122 (32, 24)
1928: 89, 94 (50, 39)
Washington Park (Indianapolis)
1920: 102, 101 (48, 43)
1921: 101, 101 (47, 24)
1922: 85, 95 (31, 56)
1923: 88, 96 (26, 52)
1924: 129, 112 (6, 9)
Association Park (Kansas City)
1920: 110, 106 (48, 29)
1921: 113, 107 (50, 45)
1922: 117, 109 (39, 36)
1923: 110, * (31, 37)
Muehlebach Park (Kansas City)
1923: 102, * (27, 37)
1924: 99, 100 (38, 34)
1928: 97, 98 (39, 41)
* - Kansas City switched home parks midseason, 1923. Overall the Monarchs played 58 games at home, 37 on the road, and their overall APF was 104.
Lewis Park (Memphis)
1924: 90, 95 (21, 23)
1928: 96, 97 (49, 35)
Borchert Field(Milwaukee)
1923: 86, 97 (9, 42)
Central Park (Pittsburgh)
1922: 110, 104 (15, 19)
Giants’ Park (St. Louis)
1920: 68, 86 (16, 20)
1921: 106, 103 (39, 32)
1922: 120, ** (9, 24))
Stars’ Park (St. Louis)
1922: 118, ** (23, 24)
1923: 141, 133 (58, 14)
1924: 107, 104 (39, 27)
1928: 124, 114 (49, 35)
** - St. Louis switched home parks midseason, 1922. Overall the Stars played 32 home games, 24 road games, and their overall APF is 110.
Swayne Field (Toledo)
1923: 89, 98 (6, 21)
Clearly, in some cases (Milwaukee’s Borchert Field, Dayton’s Ducks Park) there aren’t enough games for these figures to tell us anything. But what about the parks with several years of data?
Schorling Park, formerly the Chicago White Sox’s West South Side Park (of 1906 “Hitless Wonders” fame), looks like an awfully extreme pitchers’ park, which is something to keep in mind when looking at American Giants’ hitting stats (notably Cristóbal Torriente, but also Walter “Steel Arm” Davis and the virtually unknown but briefly great shortstop Pythias Russ).
St. Louis’s Stars’ Park, the famous one with the trolley car barn in left field, really was very good for hitters.
It appears that the numbers show the transition from Kansas City’s Association Park, reputedly a bandbox, to the more spacious Muehlebach Park.
Washington Park, home of the Indianapolis ABCs, seems quite consistent over the four years and change represented here.
Detroit’s Mack Park seems at first glance to be the most inconsistent of the league’s regular parks; I’m waiting to see what the missing years (which I’ll be getting to in coming months) will show, as well as more detailed analysis of the Stars’ schedules.
Aside from the runs information, the home/road breakdowns are themselves instructive. The presence of one or two touring teams in every season is evident in the bias toward home games; also, several teams (most obviously Chicago and Detroit) tended to have an advantage in the scheduling, with more home games than such teams as Birmingham. More on this in a future post.
UPDATE 7/27/06 Thanks to Steve G for pointing out that I mistakenly said West Side Park rather than South Side Park for the American Giants. (West Side Park is, of course, where the Cubs played.)
UPDATE 4/19/07 I’ve also figured 1924 Eastern Colored League park factors.
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