It seems like many of today's SIM owners place a huge emphasis on park selection. Yet in many of my leagues, I see a wide spread in terms of team success at home vs. on the road. The sole measure of a succesful home park selection should be an improved record when playing at home. Have any of you, my fellow managers, consistenly accomplished this? 

It's a simple question: On average, do your teams usually have a greater winning percentage at home?

I should mention that I mostly play theme leagues, where it is much harder to construct a roster perfectly tailored to a ballpark's dimensions. Do open leagues have a greater number of teams winning a greater percentage of home games? Is there a way to access and crunch such data?

I try to tailor my teams to my park, usually Forbes.   I almost always have a better home winning pct. vs. away.  If you play the same park enough times you tend to figure out who works there

Didn't we just have this thread?

I don't know of any good way to collect a lot of data on this.

I will say that my teams usually don't have a better record at home. But when they do have a better record at home, it's usually much better and they're usually horrible on the road (like 52-39 and 39-52 kind of horrible)

My teams usually play about even.  There used to be a theory floating around that Sparky manages poorly from behind.  I don't think I buy that, but when I'm looking at play-by-plays during losses the confirmation bias is powerful strong.

Posted by llamanunts on 2/11/2011 10:34:00 AM (view original):
My teams usually play about even.  There used to be a theory floating around that Sparky manages poorly from behind.  I don't think I buy that, but when I'm looking at play-by-plays during losses the confirmation bias is powerful strong.

Good point llamanunts... I had forgotten about that. I was one of the people who did some research into the "Sparky manages better with a lead" theory and I do tend to believe it.

[Well, I should say... I can't separate the notion that Sparky is better from the notion that people are optimists and build their team to play with a lead]

I looked at a few leagues I played in a while ago where everyone used the same park.

The correlation between overall winning % and home winning % was exceedingly strong (over 88%) in both leagues played in WIS Park. The correlation was only 58% when all teams played in Coors Field.

In all 3 cases, the correlation between home winning percentage and marginal pitching/offense was stronger for pitching.

In other words, road teams have a chance to score first. The more likely it is that you give up a run in the top of the first, the more likely it is that you will lose. If you play in Coors, or your pitching is bad, that's more likely to happen.

Now, I can't separate that from the probability that you would lose anyway because you are losing (I think the win probability after being down 1-0 after the top of the 1st is about 45%, but it might be even lower).

But this is where I would start. When you do better at home, is your pitching good?

There are two or three ways to create value (i.e performance) in the SIM:
The first is to exploit inefficiencies in the SIM itself.  Generally the occurs when one drafts a "bargain" player.  Players can be proced inefficiently because they are bad a position, but great at another (e.g. '75 Carter).  The SIM pricing structure also lowers salary for bad FP 1st basemen even tho 1B FP means almost nothing (e.g. '94 Jack Doyle).  There is also a positive correlation between salary and actual K/9 for pitchers, while there is a negative correlation between performance and SIM K/9.  I'd also group into this general category fatigue strategies or drafting the minimum IP and PA and smart usage of scrubs or AAA.

The second way to create value is through synergies, which means making the whole greater than the sum of parts.  This includes matching players to ballparks, but also includes matching fielding to pitching and matching players in a line-up or in the field.

As the sim stands, IMO, the best way to create value is a combination of finding bargains and matching fielders to pitchers.  Matching players to ballparks is often, but not always secondary.  As the SIM salary algorthm improves, I have no doubt ballpark selection will become more important, but unless fielding normalization changes, it won't be as important as defense to pitching pairings.