I'm new and had a question about ballparks. Which ballparks do you guys tend to use? In addition, which hitters (or pitchers) do you guys feel play really well in that park? 

Tailoring your roster to your ballpark has always seemed pretty random to me.  Just for kicks I took at look at the best teams in my current Open Leagues, where there are no restrictions on which players/parks you can use:  

1. In a recently completed OL, the top 4 teams in the league were all better on the road.

2. In another OL, 154 games in, 3 of the top 4 teams are better on the road.

3. In another OL, 91 games in, the top 4 teams are better on the road.

4. In another OL, 73 games in, the top 4 teams are better on the road.

That's 15 out of the top 16 teams performing better on the road.  These are teams with successful owners who presumably put at least a little thought into drafting players who would do well in their home park.  So what's happening?  Beats me.

bschaff15, take a look at the ballpark ratings on offense in general, on singles (this tells you about how the park affects batting average generally, all other things being equal), doubles, triples and home runs (right and left field). 

Notice that some parks - like the Astrodome, or Dodger Stadium,  for example, clearly favor pitchers and make home runs very difficult. Others favor hitters like say Tiger Stadium, Wrigley, the Kingdome or especially Coors. Some are especially good for doubles hitters - the Polo Grounds say, and others for triples hitters (from memory here, so might be wrong) like Kauffman in Kansas City (wherever it was the Royals played on artificial grass - again I might be wrong about this one). 

So you have several options:

1) pick a ball park and then draft based on that choice:

     a) meaning you draft players - hitters whose strengths are augmented by that kind of park and pitchers whose weaknesses are not exacerbated by it - for example if you have pitchers that give up a lot of HRs MAYBE you want a low HR park, unless you are more concerned to get a lot of HR production out of your hitters, or you use a triples park for a speed-based team and you are safer with a HR pitcher - nothing is automatic here, or:

     b) you draft to keep the other teams down by coordinating your ballpark with your pitching and defense - so maybe you don't get HR hitters, use a low HR park, have low HR pitchers and try to strangle offense and draft high defense players for the field

In other words, coordinating your ball park and your drafted team is not as straight-forward as it sounds, but in general, look at the characteristics of the ball park and its effect on offense of various kinds and try to draft hitters who strengths are not injured by that park or ideally are helped by some aspects of it, and pitchers who go well with it but in a combination that might also weaken strengths of your likely opponents.

There is about to be some change in pricing of players finally soon, but until then the tendency for years has been that most people Open Leagues get base stealing teams because power costs more and they get pitchers parks and deadball era pitchers. So HR teams are penalized.

I sometimes have some success and usually do not, but my approach since I don't like that kind of team and think triples should be banned altogether (:-)) is to use a park like the Kingdome or Tiger stadium, get HR/100 PA hitters and try to outscore them at home. As I say, usually not that effective, sometimes it is. 

Finally, if you don't already know, go to the bottom of the Draft Center and change the setting to Advanced Stats. 

These two parks do amazingly well at home vs road. I find that in Dodger stadium, high average base stealing teams do extremely well when you use deadball pitchers (to limit the other teams homeruns). Because you are minimizing the doubles triples AND homeruns in this park. With very few extra base hits, your opponents station to station singles hitting team is at a huge disadvantage against your more times in scoring position base stealing team (simply put, they have to outplay you at YOUR game in YOUR park).  Yankee stadium is even better when you simply overwhelm opposing teams with max homerun power in a league that doesn't use  deadball pitchers or features a homerun over .25 per 9 inning designation, such as my LOCK and LOAD team in skunks "think outside the cookie box league". This team will be hard pressed to lose 25 games at home..and always....use the hr/100# stat in the advanced stats section when trying to hit the ball out as much as possible.                                                     

Posted by crazystengel on 12/13/2015 3:35:00 AM (view original):
Tailoring your roster to your ballpark has always seemed pretty random to me.  Just for kicks I took at look at the best teams in my current Open Leagues, where there are no restrictions on which players/parks you can use:  

1. In a recently completed OL, the top 4 teams in the league were all better on the road.

2. In another OL, 154 games in, 3 of the top 4 teams are better on the road.

3. In another OL, 91 games in, the top 4 teams are better on the road.

4. In another OL, 73 games in, the top 4 teams are better on the road.

That's 15 out of the top 16 teams performing better on the road.  These are teams with successful owners who presumably put at least a little thought into drafting players who would do well in their home park.  So what's happening?  Beats me.

I've seen this perspective from other top players as well but consider it to be an incorrect reading of the data, personally.

What that tells me is that a bunch of those teams had owners who did not select an optimal ballpark for their team. Additionally, it makes sense that this result would be seen more on top teams. Top teams are the one who make the best use of the available salary. Therefore, they will win *more often than not* in "the average park". However, if the owner going in picks the optimal park for his team, they will thrive even more in that environment.

An easy park to use as an example of this is Municipal Stadium, with is -4/-4 for HRs but +1/+3/+3 for other hits. Putting a team with guys like Tip O'Neill, Honus Wagner and Sam Thompson (as opposed to guys like Jimmie Foxx, Mike Schmidt and Frank Robinson) will lead to a better record at home than on the road (on average), because Municipal is the optimal park for 2B and 3B heavy guys like O'Neill and it's highly unlikely that the team will play as many away games in Municipal as home games (all other teams would also need to be using Municipal for this to happen). It accentuates their strength and minimizes their weakness. Combined with solid pitching, there's a winning formula. 

Now, who's to say what the optimal park is for a team who's strengths are less clear? That's the tricky part and that's really why we see this in the first place; it's not clear, more often than not.

"Owners who did not select an optimal park for that team" exactly ozomatli. I've seen too many owners build a doubles team for Fenway by having the most rostered doubles but a stat like their OBP lacks. Then they wonder what happened.  Like the steals and homerun  teams I mentioned earlier, If they lack in OBP, they won't work. The freakonomics is that these owners spend money on what they think will work, but the cost of the desired stat negates what they are tryiing to do in other stats.

I have gotten tired of using Target, Astrodome and AT&T. Too often they lack production, and an A+ arm can throttle them...Am focusing more on +HR parks. Have had some success in US Cellular. Now I am trying Great American and Yankee III. Curious to see how similar/different in regards to how it affects my pitching. For now i will keep to using SP with HR/9 under 0.25. Summers '09 has been keeping pace with some lower ERC# pitchers. Time to tinker...

In the examples I posted above, the point was not "these owners drafted certain players for certain parks and they did not win."  In fact, those were the top 4 owners in each of those leagues -- they did win.  Their teams had good records, and most of them (I think 15 of the 16) had winning records at home, too.   The mystery to me is why so many of them did better on the road than at home.  I guess one answer is "they all drafted the wrong the park," although that's not entirely satisfying to me, given their overall success.  

ozomatli wrote:

Top teams are the one who make the best use of the available salary. Therefore, they will win *more often than not* in "the average park". However, if the owner going in picks the optimal park for his team, they will thrive even more in that environment. 

That makes more sense (the average park part), but even here the implication is the owners -- 15 of the top 16 owners over 4 OLs -- erred when they choose their park.

And I realize I'm not offering up any concrete explanation myself.  I honestly don't know why, when an experienced/successful owner builds a team and puts it in whichever park he wants, that he so often finds himself with a better road than home record.

A couple of things come to mind:

There are usually at least a few poorly constructed teams in an OL.
A well constructed team will likely have some success, regardless of park.
Some, if not many, of the other parks in that league will be suitable for the aforementioned team...
A single season is a small sample size.

Some good points, Doc, especially #3.  

As for the last one, this is something I've noticed in many, many leagues, so I wouldn't call it a small sample size.  I don't suppose there's any way to view home/away splits across the WIS universe?

You can see won/loss of a league by searching league wide averages(by clicking on team rankings).

The weekly snapshot does not show won/loss of home/road. At the top of the snapshot you can see the average ballpark factors for the week...

http://whatifsports.com/mlb-l/stat_snapshot.asp

I recommend going back to contrarian23's pinned thread. The topic of ballparks is discussed in length. Boogerlips made some good points in there...

One item gets little discussion: allocation of salaries.

Across the WIS universe, how is it distributed?

How many owners spend evenly between offense and pitching? By spending more/less on pitching or offense, you are playing more to a strength, or perhaps wasting money on overkill...have you found the sweet spot? Is 52% too much for pitching? 55% offense simply a waste in that hitters park?

By now we've seen a newbie draft 7 or 8 SP. Didn't save nearly enough to build a productive offense. Can't possibly utilize the 1,900 IP he/she has on the roster...drafts a stud PH that won't see the light of day nearly enough to justify the money spent on him...

This is where trial and error comes in, unless you possess the math skills of Sheldon Cooper...

Or the football skills of Sheldon Cooper:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmotigTTTUY

Bazinga!!