Quote:
Originally Posted by Murphy3
Yeah, I'm gonna go ahead and say bulsh on a couple of those stats. Again, I've learned to take all stats with a grain of salt. No one that was around following baseball would agree with the statement that the Rangers pitching was actually better than their hitting that year. If that's what some advanced metrics show, then the advanced metrics are wrong.
Trying to put a number to how much a ballpark impacts an offense is a good idea in theory, but it really cannot be done. Obviously playing in the ballpark has a positive imapct on offense, but how much compared to league average is something that we'll truly never know. There's simply no way to quantify all of the factors that would need to be quantified.
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The league ERA that year was 4.99. The Rangers had a 4.65 ERA. The Rangers scored 5.69 runs per game, compared with 5.39 runs per game leaguewide. Even if one only adjusts the tiniest sliver for ballpark effects (or, not at all - we're .34 runs a game lower than the average in ERA and only .3 runs a game over the average rpg), I think the statistics back up the argument that, in the context of the time, the Rangers excelled more at pitching than hitting. It may indeed be misleading to say they were BETTER at pitching than hitting, if only because EVERYBODY in 1996 was better at hitting. But we were more above average in pitching than they were in hitting. It doesn't really even take advanced metrics to make that argument.