A Ballplayer’s Best Friend

On April 16, Jackson Holliday ended an 0-for-17 slump with a second-inning grand slam that put the Orioles up 4-0 in an eventual 9-1 win over the Guardians. But a commanding win wasn’t the only momentous occasion taking place at Camden Yards that evening — it was also Bark in the Park night. When asked in his post-game interview if there were any furry friends he’d like to shout out, he replied, “Oh yeah, Coconut’s here,” referring to the one year old Bernedoodle that Holliday and his wife added to their family during spring training last year. Coconut attended the game wearing Holliday’s jersey and acted as his good luck charm, though Holliday believes dogs beyond his own have the power to bring him positive vibes at the plate. “I have a good track record in the minor leagues of performing on Bark in the Park, so maybe we’ll have to have these more often,” Holliday continued. That is a claim simply begging to be fact-checked.

Over Holliday’s tenure in pro ball, he’s played in eight games where fans were encouraged to bring their pups to the park, five in the minors and three in the majors. In the minors, Holliday’s teams went 1-4, as he amassed 19 plate appearances with four walks, five strikeouts, two singles, two home runs, and four RBI. That’s good for a .266/.421/.666 slash line, which isn’t bad, but when you consider Holliday posted a .303/.443/.485 line in the minors, it’s really only impressive from a power perspective (Holliday’s slash line in big league Bark in the Park games is .222/.300/.500 with four RBI over 10 PA). Still, the home runs are clearly what stand out in Holliday’s mind, and given that he went deep just 23 times over 218 games in the minor leagues and is driving the ball over the fence even less frequently in the majors, it makes sense that those four-baggers would feature prominently in his memory. Especially since all three put his team in the lead.

Now, I will confess that I only checked Holliday’s home games for Bark in the Park events. As you’ll soon see, I did an absurd amount of manual data collection for this piece, but I drew the line at checking the theme nights for every minor league affiliate Holliday faced. Maybe he disappointed dog owners up and down the Mid-Atlantic as he posted monster numbers in opponent ballparks. We’ll never know. But Holliday’s assertion that he gets a leg up from the presence of his four-legged friends led to a broader research question. Are there other players who consistently outperform their typical production with all those good boys and girls in the building?

With this question in mind, I scoured the internet and compiled a list of every Bark in the Park event in every big league stadium from 2022 through today’s games. This wasn’t the cleanest data collection process ever. Some teams have their own distinct name for the event — Pups in the Park, Dog Day, Purina Pooches in the Park (okay, this one is just the Cardinals) — and they don’t always keep a thorough accounting of their past theme nights available online. On top of that, Bark in the Parks (Barks in the Park?) are sometimes scheduled or rescheduled after the initial press release detailing the season’s promotional nights goes out. Thus, I had to take a lot of local humane society websites at their word, as these organizations frequently partner with teams to host the events. Fortunately, this is an exercise rooted in whimsy, and as such, if I missed a game or a scheduled event didn’t actually take place, I imagine that any players who feel their reputation is besmirched by this analysis will find it in their hearts to forgive me.

The Holliday example illustrates that there are a couple of variations on what it means to perform well in a Bark in the Park game. One way is to show up and convince those dogs that you go 3-for-4 with at least one extra base hit every single night because that’s all they’ve ever seen you do. Another way is to tilt the outcome of the game with one swing of the bat. As I searched for the players who thrive on canine energy, I used wOBA to measure overall performance and relied on win probability added (WPA) to identify players with an arp-titude for game-changing play, looking for numbers that either stood out relative to the player’s norm or because they were impressive by anyone’s standard.

Here are your leaders in the dawg-house.

Rangers designated hitter Joc Pederson amassed just four hits in 66 plate appearances to start the 2025 season, including a streak of 44 plate appearances without a hit. But in five games played in front of furry friends over the last few seasons, his wOBA is .899. I’m not sure I knew wOBA values could go that high, but apparently all it takes is clubbing five home runs, hitting four singles, working four walks, and getting drilled by a pitch, all in the span of 20 plate appearances.

And Pederson can’t be accused of padding his stats with garbage time knocks in blowouts either. While facing the Phillies during his stint with the Giants in 2022, Pederson entered a game at Citizens Bank Park in the seventh inning and went on to hit a go-ahead RBI single in the top of the 10th; after the Phillies re-tied the game in the bottom of the inning, he extended the Giants re-established lead in the 11th with a two-run shot that would prove to be enough to seal the victory. Last season with the Diamondbacks, he pinch-hit in the ninth inning of a game at Tropicana Field. He walked and then came around to score on a game-tying three-run homer off the bat of Adrian Del Castillo. Later, he hit an RBI single to give Arizona the lead in extras, though the Rays would eventually earn a walk-off win in the 12th. If past performance really is the best predictor of future performance, the Rangers could have gotten Pederson out of his early season slump sooner by moving up the Bark in the Park event they have scheduled for the 30th of this month.

Then there’s Angels catcher Logan O’Hoppe. Across 2023 and 2024, O’Hoppe’s wOBA was an uninspiring .318, but during five games with the hounds huddled ‘round, O’Hoppe went Super Saiyan for a .646 wOBA, including his only career triple. Of those five games, his best was a 2023 matchup against the Mariners in Seattle, in which he homered off Logan Gilbert twice to erase a three-run deficit en route to an 8-5 win for the Angels.

And O’Hoppe isn’t the only young catcher with a penchant for pups. Mets backstop Francisco Alvarez checks in with a .623 wOBA over seven Bark in the Park games, compared to his career .310 wOBA, compiled in just over two seasons in the big leagues. Over 26 pooch-powered plate appearances, Alvarez eschewed singles entirely, instead opting to hit two doubles and six home runs; he also notched two walks. And of his three career stolen bases, two were swiped in front of a sea of slobbery spectators.

Just as we went from one catcher to another, we can also transition from one Alvarez to another. Facing Yordan Alvarez on a regular day is enough to incite bowel distress in opposing pitchers, and that’s somehow even more true with a ballpark full of dogs snacking on ballpark franks. But hey, at least there should be plenty of poop bags around. Maintaining a wOBA just north of .400 is standard operating procedure for Alvarez, but that number jumps to .612 when the pee pads are down. And surprisingly, that .612 wOBA isn’t boosted by Alvarez launching moonshots for his hound friends to howl at. Over seven games and 29 plate appearances, Alvarez does have one two-homer game, but beyond that, he earned that number the hard way, with one double, eight singles, eight walks, and just one (!) strikeout. Something about having pets in the park allows Alvarez to lock in, like a dog with a bone.

Likewise, Brewers first baseman Rhys Hoskins modifies his hitting profile somewhat when the pups are present. He is normally a power-over-contact hitter, but on Bark in the Park nights, he decides to become the man his dog thinks he is, hitting singles at twice his typical rate without sacrificing power. Over 10 games and 46 plate appearances, Hoskins has accumulated 12 singles and five home runs for a wOBA of .568. His best performance came during one of the dog days of August in 2022, Hoskins’ last season with the Phillies. In the fourth inning of a game in Cincinnati, he hit a three-run homer to put his team up by two, then extended that lead in the eighth by launching another ball over the fence and scoring Garrett Stubbs in the process. And like Holliday, Hoskins took advantage of a Bark in the Park event hosted in his home stadium to bring his personal pup to the yard and homer in her honor.

And then there’s the hitter who perhaps most embodies the Holliday mold; their overall performance during Bark in the Park games mirrors their season averages, but big moments abound. Over 13 Barks in the Park, Phillies third baseman Alec Bohm has hit a go-ahead RBI single in extras, slugged a game-tying homer in the ninth, and partnered with then-teammate and aforementioned Bark in the Park enthusiast, Hoskins, to start a rally against peak-Sandy Alcantara before returning to the plate the very next inning and nailing Alcantara for a triple that scored two. In yet another game, he pinch-hit in the seventh and came through with a game-tying RBI single; later that season, he managed to tie a game in the ninth with an RBI hit by pitch when a 98 mph fastball from Edwin Díaz rode in on his hands.

However, the player who might have the most memorable Bark in the Park stat line was a one-and-done. Even though he failed to establish enough of a track record for us to discern even a faint signal amid the noise of a stadium howling with glee, the Rule of Awesome overrides sample size concerns. On September 4, 2022, during Purina Pooches in the Park night at Busch Stadium, Albert Pujols, in his final season, stepped to the plate as a pinch-hitter in the bottom of the eighth and broke an 0-0 tie with a two-run homer, the 695th of his career.

Of course, hitters aren’t the only ones influenced by the vibes of a good theme night. But pitchers are a bit harder to get a read on in this particular situation since they appear in fewer games overall. Starters don’t tend to accumulate enough distinct appearances to pick up even the frivolous patterns we’re seeking here, while relievers might have several appearances, but only see them amount to 10 or 12 batters faced. Nevertheless, a few individuals distinguished themselves.

Ryan Weathers threw in two pup-friendly events with the Padres in 2023 and notched another two with the Marlins in 2024. He covered 25 innings in those four games and allowed just four earned runs, good for a 1.44 ERA; comparatively, his overall ERA those two seasons was 4.79. In fact, the best start of Weathers’ career thus far (eight scoreless innings against the Tigers) came on a Bark in the Park night in Detroit last May. Indeed, when sorting his 31 appearances over the last two seasons by pitcher run value, four of his top eight appearances came in front of a canine crowd, with those four starts accounting for 0.7 of the 0.9 WAR he earned in 2023 and 2024. Get Weathers on an all Bark in the Park schedule and he might just win a Cy Young.

Rockies starter Kyle Freeland also counts his three Bark in the Park outings among his best starts over the last three seasons. Two of the three games even came at home in Colorado, negating the possibility that a lurking variable like more favorable park factors might be driving these results. No, no, no, the dogs are the only possible explanation for Freeland’s 2.20 ERA and 19 strikeouts over 16.1 innings.

On the reliever side of things, Dylan Floro should probably get approval for an emotional support dog to accompany him to the mound each night, because he has a tail-wagging good time surrounded by his furry friends. Over 10.1 innings, spanning seven games, Floro allowed just three hits, one walk, and one earned run. In three of those outings, he pitched two innings without allowing a hit, a feat he has only accomplished one other time since the start of 2022. His wOBA allowed during those Bark in the Park games was .106, compared to the .312 he posted in the other games those seasons. So far this season, Floro has thrown one scoreless inning for the Athletics’ Triple-A affiliate, but given their stadium situation, the A’s don’t currently have any Pups at the Park events scheduled this year. If Floro hopes to make a triumphant return to the majors, he may need to pray to the same God that sends all dogs to heaven and ask for a trade.

But just as one person’s trash is another person’s treasure, one player’s Bark in the Park is another player’s Fright Night (or Bite Night, as the case may be). Tigers outfielder Kerry Carpenter has 11 Barks in the Park to his name. In 40 plate appearances in those games, he has just two singles and two walks. You might think Carpenter’s performance has nothing to do with the dogs. He famously owns a career .378 wOBA against right-handed pitching, but a mere .273 wOBA against lefties; maybe the theme nights just happened to fall when Carpenter had the misfortune of facing a left-handed starter. But that wasn’t the case. Of those 40 plate appearances, 35 came against righties. So instead of one extreme split explaining the phenomena, Carpenter has another to add to his player page: a .376 wOBA on nights when there is no barking in the park and a .097 wOBA on nights when there is.

And it turns out some hitters develop more niche reactions when their home turf is invaded by ETs (energetic terriers). Phillies catcher J.T. Realmuto suffers a near total power outage, while everything else about his performance at the plate remains roughly in line with his average output over the last few seasons. In 47 plate appearances spread across 11 games, he has largely maintained his usual rates for hitting singles, striking out, and working walks, but his usual pacing on doubles, triples, and home runs has cratered. His only extra base hit is a double, dropping his typical .340 wOBA down to .188. Perhaps Realmuto is allergic to pet dander and the presence of dogs causes him respiratory issues, slowing him down on the base paths and sapping his power. Perhaps dogs make him anxious. Especially the little ones with their beady eyes and yappy barks.

Then there are the hitters who, instead of delivering in high-leverage spots in front of a bunch of furry fans, find themselves wishing they could go hide under the bed. Royals first baseman Vinnie Pasquantino has batted 39 times in nine Bark in the Park games. In 15 of those plate appearances, Pasquantino batted with runners in scoring position; he managed a hit just twice. The first was a single to score Bobby Witt Jr. from third and bring the Royals within a run of the White Sox in the sixth inning of a 2023 game that Kansas City would eventually lose, while the second came earlier this year, when he hit a three-run, bases-loaded single to extend the Royals lead over the Orioles to an 8-2 advantage. In his other 13 opportunities with runners in scoring position, Pasquantino grounded into four double plays, hit catchable balls in the air five times, grounded out in a non-double play fashion three times, and struck out once. In his three opportunities with a runner on first, he flew out once and logged another pair of GIDP. For his career, Pasquantino has hit for a .295 average with runners on base and a .305 average with runners in scoring position, but with pups running around the park, those marks are .111 and .133 respectively. When dogs see Pasquantino come to the plate with runners on base, they collectively think “automatic out.”

As for the pitchers, I’ve already mentioned Alcantara’s ruff start against Bohm and Hoskins, but that wasn’t the only Bark in the Park experience that ended with him in the doghouse. In a 2022 game against the Mariners, he kept his defense busy fetching balls in play, allowing six hits and issuing four walks, leading to five earned runs in 5.2 innings pitched. Julio Rodríguez and J.P. Crawford both homered and reached base multiple times, with Abraham Toro and Jesse Winker contributing to the scoring as well. Alcantara started 32 games in 2022, but only two of them were worse than his Bark in the Park starts against the Phillies and Mariners (he allowed six runs each to the Dodgers and Braves in 3.2 and five innings, respectively). Given that the rest of Alcantara’s season was good enough to win him the Cy Young that year, he’s probably content to delight the doggos as they watch from home, rather than in the stadium.

Alcantara’s two duds on Dog Day might be happenstance, but it’s harder to make that argument in the case of Cardinals starter Sonny Gray, who has four Bark in the Park starts (three last year and one in 2023 while pitching for the Twins) totaling 23.1 innings, in which he allowed a .370 wOBA to opposing hitters. Over the last two seasons, Gray’s HR/9 sat at 0.79, but with the paw patrol in attendance, that number grew to 2.31. Some of those homers were hit by legit boppers such as Hoskins and Elly De La Cruz, but the rest came from less prolific power hitters like Jake Bauers, Joey Ortiz, and Bryan De La Cruz, with a two-homer game from Spencer Steer. But that’s a lot of words to describe Gray’s Bark in the Park starts when it really only takes one: Woof.

Like Gray, George Kirby’s wOBA allowed creeps up above .370 when he takes the mound for the Mariners with a myriad of mutts watching. Kirby’s six starts skew more meh than maladroit, but his first Dog Day was such a disaster that it may have soured him on the concept forever. On June 27, 2022, he allowed four home runs to four different Orioles in his four innings on the bump. And if a four-homer outing doesn’t etch itself deeply enough in a pitcher’s memory, ceding back-to-back long balls in back-to-back innings has to be haunting.

While Kirby might be haunted by his Bark in the Park outing, A.J. Minter might well be cursed. In 2.1 innings spanning four appearances for the Braves and Mets, Minter has faced 12 batters and allowed four runs on two singles, three doubles, and a home run. In a game against the Mariners last April, he failed to secure an out before yielding a walk-off home run to Mitch Garver. Going back to a 2022 game against the Marlins, Minter got the last two outs of the sixth, then came back out for the seventh, but failed to finish the frame after yielding doubles to Jorge Soler, Garrett Cooper, and Joey Wendle.

Minter made his fourth Bark in the Park appearance last Friday, and based on the box score, it might appear as though the curse has been lifted. He went a third of an inning, with one hit and no runs allowed. Seems okay. However, Minter entered the game with one out in the bottom of the ninth of a tie game. He replaced Ryne Stanek, who had already blown the save and left with a runner on first. Minter got one out on a fielder’s choice, but James Wood snuck a groundball up the middle that allowed CJ Abrams to score from first. The run is credited to Stanek, and given that the ball did just eke past the glove of Jeff McNeil and that Abrams is an unusually fast runner, maybe it’s fair to let Minter off the hook. Or maybe Minter is cursed.

Another reliever who struggles in the company of critters is Adrian Morejon of the Padres. There’s a reason they don’t call him Adrian MoreDOG. Anyway, like Minter, he’s pitched in four Bark in the Park events, totaling 2.1 innings, but Morejon has faced 24 batters and allowed six runs on eight singles, two doubles, and a home run for a wOBA allowed of .514, compared to his average wOBA allowed of .311 since the start of 2023 (the year he first appeared in a Bark in the Park game). Unlike the other pitchers featured here, Morejon’s issue isn’t the long ball. The lone home run dogging his stat line is a solo shot that occurred with the Padres already down 8-4. Rather, Morejon gets dinked and dunked to death. Even in the outing where he came closest to pitching a clean inning, he still couldn’t escape before beaning Andrew McCutchen with a 97 mph fastball.

But enough about individual player performance. Teams control these events, and while the intended benefit is increased gate revenue and positive sentiment among fans, might there also be downstream effects on the field? The tables below summarize each team’s winning percentage in Bark in the Park games relative to their overall winning percentage from the start of 2022 through the start of games on Sunday. And since we’re dealing with such small samples, I’ve also included run differential per game to either reinforce or undercut how “real” these win rates are. At least to the extent that any of them are real. One table shows just the team’s home events, hosted in their own ballparks, while the other includes all Bark in the Park games that a team has played in, regardless of whether it was at home or on the road. For reference, the team’s overall winning percentage and run differential are shown alongside the difference between those values and the Bark in the Park numbers to demonstrate how their Bark in the Park games stack up against their typical performance:

Before getting to the records, let’s speculate about why some teams don’t seem to care much for these events, while others can’t seem to get enough. Teams that play in older stadiums, like the Red Sox, Cubs, and to a lesser extent the Dodgers, might feel their facilities aren’t properly equipped, or that the dogs might mess up their historic venues. The Yankees are probably too self-important. And in places like Minneapolis and Atlanta, the window when the weather is appropriate to have dogs outside for hours at a time is narrower than in other places. At the other end of the spectrum, teams like the Pirates, Marlins, Nationals, and (until this season) the Athletics seem to realize the product on the field isn’t getting folks through the door, so they need to offer other incentives.

But even if the A’s were hosting dog-friendly games as a gimmick, they should probably figure out a way to host more based on an improved winning percentage that’s further supported by an increase in run differential. Ditto for the Rays. In fact, both teams should have a dozen of these on the schedule this seas— oh wait, never mind. The Royals and Reds sport a nifty win rate, but the run differential suggests they’ve gotten lucky in close games. And on the less sunny side of things, the Tigers boast an improved run differential that hasn’t translated into wins, while the Mariners, Pirates, and Nats may want to host fewer events, as their win rates and run differential sag like the droopy eyes of an exhausted pup after a day at the ballpark:

Though the Angels don’t host any of their own Bark in the Park events, they love spoiling every other team’s good time. It’s just six games, but I’m slapping an eyeball emoji on that run differential. The Rangers, Mariners, Tigers, and Phillies also seem to derive joy from winning in front of opposing fans’ friends on four legs. Meanwhile, the Cardinals are perhaps being punished for letting a sponsor name their event Purina Pooches in the Park, thereby introducing atrocious vibes to a theme night that otherwise all but guarantees everyone will have a ball.

As this was an article born of wanting to fact-check Jackson Holliday and see if it was possible to use data from Bark in the Park games to engage in some light-hearted speculation on which players or teams are either super into or deeply hate dogs (with an understanding that no definitive answers would be possible), I don’t really have any grandiose conclusions for you as we close things out. Instead, I’ll leave you with a few tidbits I ran across while looking up historical Bark in the Park dates.

The Washington Nationals once hosted a Caturday theme night, complete with a t-shirt. However, cats were not allowed to attend. A fan sued the Marlins stadium operator and the City of Miami after she slipped on pee on the concourse during a Bark in the Park event. Finally, the Pirates got roasted in the comments under a post about Pup Nights. Not even a cute corgi can distract fans from the woes of their favorite baseball team.

This piece is dedicated to my cat Paprika, who passed away on Easter. She was just as spicy as her name implies and an avid watcher of baseball. Assuming games watched through closed eyelids still count.