FG on Fox: The Coors Field Hangover
Did you know the Rockies tend to put up big home and road splits? Of course you did. The Rockies are the very most important example of why park effects matter. Also, the most obvious. Over the past decade, the Rockies rank first in baseball in total runs scored at home, by more than 200. Over the same period, the Rockies rank last in baseball in total runs scored away from home, by more than 100. Hitting in Coors is easy! Hitting not in Coors is hard. Or so the Rockies make it look, at least.
Coors Field just does strange things to baseball. It’s not an unsolvable problem, and it might not necessarily be a problem, but, it’s something. Again, over a decade, the Rockies rank 14th in winning percentage at home. Meanwhile, they rank 28th in winning percentage on the road. If you observe the following table, you’ll note that the Rockies are exceptional in this way. They experience either a home-field advantage, a road-field disadvantage, or both.
| Team | Home W% | Road W% | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rockies | 0.547 | 0.389 | 0.158 |
| Pirates | 0.512 | 0.378 | 0.134 |
| Brewers | 0.567 | 0.447 | 0.120 |
| Rays | 0.563 | 0.450 | 0.113 |
| Blue Jays | 0.554 | 0.443 | 0.111 |
| Astros | 0.494 | 0.385 | 0.109 |
| Cardinals | 0.601 | 0.498 | 0.103 |
| Braves | 0.579 | 0.483 | 0.096 |
| Tigers | 0.579 | 0.483 | 0.096 |
| Yankees | 0.622 | 0.531 | 0.091 |
| A’s | 0.564 | 0.473 | 0.091 |
| Nationals | 0.522 | 0.432 | 0.090 |
| Reds | 0.544 | 0.456 | 0.088 |
| Red Sox | 0.589 | 0.501 | 0.088 |
| Padres | 0.528 | 0.443 | 0.085 |
| Indians | 0.539 | 0.457 | 0.082 |
| Mariners | 0.499 | 0.417 | 0.082 |
| Rangers | 0.555 | 0.478 | 0.077 |
| Twins | 0.525 | 0.451 | 0.074 |
| Orioles | 0.502 | 0.430 | 0.072 |
| D-Backs | 0.517 | 0.446 | 0.071 |
| Giants | 0.540 | 0.470 | 0.070 |
| Dodgers | 0.560 | 0.494 | 0.066 |
| White Sox | 0.535 | 0.473 | 0.062 |
| Cubs | 0.498 | 0.436 | 0.062 |
| Royals | 0.463 | 0.416 | 0.047 |
| Angels | 0.583 | 0.536 | 0.047 |
| Marlins | 0.494 | 0.448 | 0.046 |
| Phillies | 0.557 | 0.520 | 0.037 |
| Mets | 0.516 | 0.484 | 0.032 |
It’s the Rockies, then the Pirates, some distance away. It’s pretty obvious the Rockies haven’t been as comfortable on the road as they have been in Colorado. Every team plays worse in other places, but the Rockies perform especially so, and because this is so consistent year to year, that causes people to theorize. Everyone wants to figure out why the Rockies have been so lousy away from home. Answer that, and maybe one could find a solution.
I remember reading, many many years ago, about a proposed Coors Field hangover. This was supposed to affect the bats, and the idea was that, upon reaching sea level, Rockies hitters would have to get re-accustomed to seeing pitches break normally. That is, in Colorado, pitches don’t move like they do in other places, and Rockies players get used to that. So when they go on the road, normal movement looks like abnormal movement, and then it takes time to adjust. Time that the Rockies don’t always have. I remember thinking the evidence was pretty compelling. Unfortunately I don’t have a link, but what I do have is a re-examination. I wanted to look at this for myself. Have Rockies hitters just taken a few days to get used to conventional pitching on road trips?
Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.
Jeff made Lookout Landing a thing, but he does not still write there about the Mariners. He does write here, sometimes about the Mariners, but usually not.
It was a link from DailyBaseballData, they covered it looking at a playoff series.
Perhaps the Rockies players, due to familiarity with playing in Denver, maintain a similar level of play regardless of location. Perhaps, instead, it is their opponents who actually vary significantly from their norms when they play in Coors Field.
Rockies players hit better at Coors because their opponents’ pitchers perform poorly. Rockies players hit worse on the road because the opponents’ pitchers are suddenly significantly better (and Rockies’ hitters spend 50% of their season playing against visiting pitchers who are typically having an off-night).
Visiting hitters play around 80% of their games unaided by park factors of Coors Field, so to keep their jobs in MLB they need to be better hitters than someone who plays 50% at Coors. (When a hitter is traded away from the Rockies he flounders compared to previous levels. Yet a hitter like Morneau, who some thought was close to finished, suddenly flourish at Coors.) So, I conclude that a hitter lucky enough to play 50% at Coors may not refine his craft as diligently as if he played on another team. When a Rockies’ pitcher, fighting against the Coors park factor to make his pitches effective, faces better quality offenses that are then artificially enhanced by the thin air, he will struggle more often.
So, IMO, there is a case that the Rockies’ opponents level of play changes more inside or outside of Coors.
This was my first thought as well.
I don’t think that “When a hitter is traded away from the Rockies he flounders compared to previous levels” is necessarily true, and there are several examples.
Seth Smith: Best wRC+ as a Rockie – 124; Total wRC+ as a Rockie – 110. Best wRC+ in another uniform – 133; Total wRC+ in another uniform – 115
Chris Iannetta: Best wRC+ as a Rockie – 129; Total wRC+ as a Rockie – 101. Best wRC+ in another uniform – 126; Total wRC+ in another uniform – 116
Matt Holliday – Best wRC+ as a Rockie – 151; Total wRC+ as a Rockie – 133. Best wRC+ in another uniform – 154; Total wRC+ in another uniform – 143
Dexter Fowler – Best wRC+ as a Rockie – 120; Total wRC+ as a Rockie – 103. wRC+ in only season in another uniform – 124
Clint Barmes – Best wRC+ as a Rockie – 97; Total wRC+ as a Rockie – 71. Best wRC+ in another uniform – 93; Total wRC+ in another uniform – 72
Yorvit Torrealba – Best wRC+ as a Rockie – 81; Total wRC+ as a Rockie – 70. Best wRC+ in another uniform – 105; Total wRC+ in another uniform – 87
Those (I believe) are the only 6 Rockies in their top 30 of all-time fWAR that played a lot (min. 1000 PA) in post-humidor Coors Field and then went on to play significant time for another team. All 6 of them posted a better total wRC+ away from the Rockies and 4 of the 6 had their best single season away from the Rockies as well. Not sure what this means exactly, but I think it tells us, as conclusively as a sample of 6 players can, that hitters generally tend to improve when they move from the Rockies to another team. May look specifically at road numbers after seeing this and see what that tells me.
I think the Coors hangover effect is very real – but I’m not sure what statistical method can figure out what’s happening. The biggest problem for the Rockies themselves in dealing with it is that they’ve got a lineup full of guys who can’t take a pitch and can’t take a walk. That ultimately doesn’t change from the beginning of a road trip to the end of a road trip. The result is that the Rockies have essentially created an unsolveable problem via their roster construction. And for as long as those players remain Rockies, those player habits get reinforced by everyone else in the lineup.
The hangover effect would definitely reveal itself in the propensity of batters to swing more when the opposing pitcher is nibbling and to chase pitches out of the zone because the pitches are more likely to move outside the zone back at sea level. But the only ‘learning’ that would occur on a road trip would occur to a batter who is habitually patient and disciplined anyway.
Swap the Rays and the Rockies rosters and I can see that the road performance would likely improve over the course of a road trip. And that the Rays would also likely have the ability to home/road ‘platoon’ their batting order to move the overly patient batters up in the order on the road and down in the order at home – to produce better road results (or at least more runs on the road).
Personally I think more significant home/road results could occur by platooning the rotation between home/road. Pitchers who are reasonably successful at Coors are almost certainly mediocre on the road because they have no ‘stuff’ that gets messed with and exposed at Coors. An entire rotation full of mediocre starters is not a very good way to take pressure off the batters on a road trip. Batters need the occasional pitchers duel or ace performance – and Lord knows really big SS need to have something other than a rotation full of lefty pitch-to-contact GB inducers where all the hard hit GB’s hit by righties taking advantage of opposite-handed pitchers come at them.
Long-term the Rockies really do need to figure out ‘how to employ an ace and keep them effective’ more than ‘how to make sure all our pitchers can pitch at altitude’. What they have done instead with their total focus on Coors is to create a ‘Rockies-type’ pitcher and a ‘Rockies-type’ batter.
Actually I do think a reasonable home-road test for hangover effect might be – look at Todd Helton’s career home-road results to see whether those changed over the course of a road trip. He was very much the epitome of a patient disciplined batter. If his career results indicate improvement over the course of a road trip, then there probably is something to the notion that it takes some time for batters eyes to readjust to more pitch movement.
Hmmm… maybe the Rockies hitters’ true(ish) talent is on display on the road and the Coors effect is big enough to do that to their numbers at home? Perhaps the team, overall, has just been offensively inept lately, but that plays as decent at home?
When guys leave Coors they don’t hit as poorly as the road numbers. It is more complicated than just “the Rockies hitters really stink, but get made to look very good due to the park”.
That is certainly the meme. ‘Rockies hitters suck because their road performance is their ‘true’ talent and Rockies pitchers suck because their ERA’s are so high’
The reality is that there isn’t a single example of a former Rockie who didn’t dramatically improve their road numbers once they donned a different uniform. Indeed, with the exception of a modest babip reduction, their overall season performance is almost identical when they change uniforms.
Which pretty much disproves your meme. And merely indicates that a ‘Coors effect’ at home almost exactly offsets a ‘Coors hangover’ on the road – for Rockies players. For visitors, there is no Coors hangover effect – just a Coors effect.
Jeff Cirillo disagrees.
I’m pretty sure that was Seattle’s fault.
Cirillo was already declining when he became a Rockie. Became a worse hitter at Coors – and then lost the remaining babip advantage (bigger then cuz it was before humidor) when he became a Mariner. There is absolutely no Coors ‘blip’ in his aging curve. Just a serious aging decline for 5-6 years with a late career blip that had nothing to do with Coors
I find it interesting that the NL Central seems to be filled with teams sporting disproportionally strong home field advantages. What’s the deal with that?
One more oddity, it seems like all of the Sabr-friendly front offices are in the upper half of the list, while the bottom 10 teams with the smallest home/road splits are mainly traditional strategy teams. Could Sabr-friendly team construction contribute to enhanced home field advantage or increased issues on the road?
You could potentially do an analysis of the Rockies’ record in the first game of an road series vs. their record in the final game of a road series.
Here’s 2014:
In all, the Rockies played 26 Road Series.
In Game 1’s, their record was 5 – 16
In the last game of a road series, their record was also 5 – 16
Well, maybe you don’t have to do a whole article about it.
Here are the overall records while I have it up:
The Rockies played 51 series on the season:
In Game 1’s, their overall record was 8 – 43
In the last game of a series, their record was 13 – 38
Somewhat interestingly, that means that in the middle games of a series (so Game 2 in a Best of 3 or Games 2 and 3 in a best of 4), they had a record of 45 – 15.
I wonder if that means anything.
Probably doesn’t mean anything. Bad pitching is going to lose you games wherever you play. You’d have to look at the hitters as individuals.
Has anyone done a study on which hitting types thrive best at altitude? Or do all batters get a uniform boost to their innate ability? I suspect the Rockies have a pretty good of which hitters across the league are projected to gain the most from playing in Colorado.
Don’t know if anyone’s done a study on it – but seems to me that batters who swing, can generate flyballs, and have above-average power benefit the most. Guys like Andrus, Mauer, Zobrist would probably benefit the least.
I’ve seen a similar study somewhere that actually seemed to find a pitching hangover effect. The theory was that SPs had to adjust when going on the road, and it took a few days. Pitching metrics were definitely elevated for the first few games of the average road trip. The author, if I remember right, even suggested sending SPs on road trips a few days early to acclimate.
FWIW
Some would say it is already the case, but I’d like to see Denver only used for minor league baseball. Move the Rockies to a near sea level city.
The level of fan support in Colorado is way too high for that to ever happen. They were 5th in the NL in attendance last year with a 66-96 record.
I was wondering how players who are traded away from the Rockies in-season perform in their first few games away from Coors Field, but there just weren’t that many players traded away from the Rockies during the season over the last 13 years. I found 8 players, but two of them had a long gap of time between their last game with the Rockies and first with their new team.
Of the remaining six players, this is how they did after leaving the Rockies:
Games 1 to 3 after leaving the Rockies: .190/.227/.524
Games 4 to 6 after leaving the Rockies: .286/.318/.333
Games 7 to 9 after leaving the Rockies: .190/.304/.238
Games 10 to 12 after leaving the Rockies: .333/.417/.571
Games 13 to 15 after leaving the Rockies: .190/.381/.286
Six players just isn’t enough of a sample size to learn much, though.