Minor League Run Factors and 2011 Yankee Prospects

By EJ Fagan On May 26, 2011 · 5 Comments · In Prospects

The various minor leagues tend to have radically different playing conditions. Certain leagues, like the Pacific Coast League, play on average, in terms of run scoring, like Fenway Park or The Ballpark At Arlington. Others play like Citi Field or Petco park. Reasons include everything from the type of player assigned to that league to the climate to average elevation to absurdly shaped ballparks. Here’s a chart that I created of minor league park factors:

All numbers are solely from 2011.  LF+ is LeagueFactor+, an index where 100 is the average across all of baseball. I highlighted the leagues relevant to Yankee prospects. Note that none of the Yankee farm teams play in stadiums with significant park factors relative to the rest of the league. The Yankees are pretty good about making sure that their home games aren’t played in crazy conditions.

A few observations from this chart:

For the most park, Yankee hitting prospects will are always at a big disadvantage. Except for the South Atlantic League, league factors are far below the average across the board. Yankee Double-A prospects are particularly hurt. This will get a little better as the weather warms up – both the International League and Eastern League have to deal with pretty crappy weather in the spring in almost all of their ballparks.

At the same time, Charleston hitters are enjoying a fairly rosy hitting environment, but its not too crazy. Charleston is enjoying some breakout offensive performances from Rob Segedin, Slade Heathcott, Kyle Roller, Ramon Flores, and J.R. Murphy, but they are far from the highest scoring team in the league. That’s reason to believe that their seasons are indicative of strong performance, not lower levels of competition.

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5 Responses to Minor League Run Factors and 2011 Yankee Prospects

  1. Sean P says:
    May 26, 2011 at 3:20 pm

    Two things:

    Where did you get the numbers from, did you create the factors yourself?

    Also, why would you ever use 2 months worth of park factors? 3 years worth of data is pretty universally agreed upon to be the norm. Charleston’s stadium is a pitcher’s park not the other way around. Right now these are telling you more about the individual teams than the park.

    [Reply]

  2. oldpep says:
    May 26, 2011 at 3:24 pm

    Agreed about the sample size.

    Is there anybody still doing MLE’s? I always liked those-they made it a lot easier rating prospects.

    [Reply]

    Sean P Reply:
    May 26th, 2011 at 3:35 pm

    Oh, and I forgot StatCorner also does this for all parks and actually splits the data by RH/LH. Pretty useful

    [Reply]

  3. Sean P says:
    May 26, 2011 at 3:33 pm

    Yeah, FirstInning.com has a rolling park factor set that’s frequently updated in season. They’re pretty different from EJs http://firstinning.com/pf/?type=basic&lg=SAL&min=250&season=2011

    [Reply]

  4. Minor League Run Factors » Stathead » Blog Archive says:
    May 26, 2011 at 5:10 pm

    [...] Minor League Run Factors: From The Yankee Analysts, an index to compare how various minor league run environments stack up. [...]

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