Again, taking another short break in between grading papers today - this time a plagiarized paper by a student in a senior-level course who copied straight out of Wikipedia, as if professors can't use Google (!) - and I stumbled onto this thread.
Assuming jfranco that your team has finished its season by now, and has done better than nearly all of my teams anywhere as usual, I have no intention of giving advice. So, I offer some impressions I have of parks based on small sample sizes, strictly anecdotal, so take these as you wish:
Dodgers' stadium works well to keep scoring down it seems, but I at least have not come up with the right lineup to maximize my own offense using it. Probably it needs the SB type team with 3 Tim Raines and so forth that I don't want to do, and won't so it will be unusual that I use it in the future.
While the Polo Grounds and Fenway do seem to work as doubles-scoring parks, the former more than one would suspect maybe, Sportsmen's Park seemed to not help my lineup except for Ted Williams who liked it there.
Fenway and Coors can work against your team as much as help it, and it takes real depth of analysis to make Fenway work. A team of RH sluggers alone won't do it. More OBP, some speed, people who can use the Green Monster to play pinball as they run around the bases. HoJo ì89 had 153 RBI for me and Willie Mays '66 hit a new "best" performance history, but Mike Piazza might as well have been Jerry Grote for how he hit there.
I have tried out a few stadiums whose effects according to the SIM don't quite seem to work out: Sicks is not as big for offense as I expected (admittedly the team there is in an unusual all-platoon Theme League, but the pitchers are not allowed to have ERAs under 2.75 or WHIPs under 1.00 and still little scoring.
Yankee Stadium III does give up more HRs but not nearly as much given its +3/+4 rating as I would have expected. Its main effect, along with Fenway, may be limiting triples, which means you are going with a park based on countering a dominant offense by your opponents, but not necessarily getting what you want offensively. I recently built for Yankee III - Babe Ruth '29 and Roger Maris '61. Maris, who in Yankee I on an all-1961 Theme League team has hit 35 HRs by around mid-season, hit 3 or 4 there one-third of the way through the season.
One weird thing: does anyone here actually think that Yankee Stadium I was neutral for HRs down the RF line? Because if WIS is right about that, and that is its rating when it is available (not in OL leagues for some reason) then the whole of Yankees management was wrong for 50 successful seasons. As were its opponents who fed LH pitchers as a steady diet for decades to counter an apparently mythical effect.
One stadium I wanted to like - Ebbets Field - I have not figured out how to use well. It seems like it should be a good stadium for a team that is not too heavily loaded in any one direction - it modestly increases HRs, so if you have good hitters with a little power it should help a bit, without wearing out your pitchers. You can risk pitchers that give up a few more HRs than the strict austerity-deadball guys maybe. Yet a team with SBs, high averages could use it too. Except of all the stadiums it is where I have had the worst teams (which is saying something in my case).
Lately I think that parks like Wrigley, Tiger Stadium, Navin, and so forth may work better than some of the usually-identified hitters parks especially for homerun oriented teams. They facilitate HRs, at least in theory, while not having the effect on your pitching staff that Memorial, Coors and some others do. I think. We'll see, as some of the teams I have built for them are still sitting in unfilled Theme Leagues.
I like the Kingdome. I seem to be able to create good teams that fit well there. One division winner (about to start the playoffs - wish me luck), one team in 1st place at mid-season. The kind of hitters I like - Moises Alou, Don Mattingly, seem to like it there, and so do some of the power hitters from yesteryear like Hal Trosky and Cravath. I suspect Roberto Clemente in the right year, or Stan Musial might do well there. ERAs are probably a half-point higher than they would otherwise be if you put a team there, and you don't want to experiment with especially low-IP in that park, but it is not Coors either.
None of this is very scientific, impressions as I wrote at the start. And I have some prejudices, I admit. I don't like pitchers' parks in general. Shea is tolerable, but just. I hate triples and think they should be banned: you are out if you go past second base on your own hit and don't make it home. You shouldn't be in the majors if you can't score from second on a single or first on a good double.
I like some speed at the top of the order and think that players that had power and speed, like Mantle before his knees died, Mays, Barry Bonds when he was...you know, are the great athletes. But you probably should be banned from stealing based unless you bat first in the order or have already hit 15 home runs that season. (These are just my own prejudices and I have admitted they are that, so nobody with Vince Coleman at every position get bent out of shape, I am not calling for changing anything here at WIS, just making clear why I don't want to create teams that fit the Astrodome or whatever).
Some of the Cincinnati parks are intriguing, but I am not sure yet how best to use them. I had one team in Riverfront, with Henry Aaron and John Stone '36, but it did not do as I had hoped. But it hit .288 as a team - Dave Orr hit .373 and Willie Keeler .353. Only Barry Larkin '88 well under hit hit performance average. But it only hit 54 home runs as a team - Aaron '56 hit 17, and stole 74 bases. The pitching was not good, so it could be that I have solved that puzzle by 35-40% with more work to do.
Back to sociology papers. Let's see now, Ebbets should work well for sociology. But that International Relations needs a pacific ball park, something tranquil like Petco. We'll put political science in the Polo Grounds, the course on elections could be taught in Fenway (right) one year, and Yankee (left) the next...economics can go in Coors for all the good it does us....