What’s up with these long outs at Globe Life Field?
It seems like so many crushed baseballs are falling short of leaving the yard.
In the third inning of Game 2 of the NLCS, Chris Taylor lofted a long fly ball to dead center. He crushed it: the ball left the bat with an exit velocity of 108.6 mph and a launch angle of 22 degrees. It had an expected batting average of .960 and an expected wOBA of 1.689. Cristian Pache had to retreat to the track, but he made the catch, without any highlight reel effort necessary.
During the regular season, similar batted balls to Taylor’s flyout went for extra bases 94 percent of the time, and more specifically, went for home runs 80 percent of the time. All season, just one out on this type of contact was made.
In baseball, these things happen all the time: balls are crushed, and the fielders just happen to be in the perfect position to make a normally-difficult play look relatively easy. But, during this postseason, there seems to be a troubling trend for games played at Globe Life Field: balls that normally would go for extra bases or home runs are turning into outs at very, very high rates, and it likely isn’t due to defense alone.
Through Game 2 of the NLCS, there were a total of 72 batted balls at Globe Life Field that had an underlying expected wOBA of at least .500. This .500 xwOBA threshold provided an ample sample size, as well as generally leading to positive results for hitters: they posted a .747 average and a 1.448 slugging percentage on these batted balls during the regular season. Of the 72 with this solid contact, 27 were still turned into outs, good for a 34.2 percent crushed-but-out rate. That’s worse than its American League bubble counterpart, Petco Park (31.4 percent), which is not only one of the most-pitcher-friendly parks in the majors, but has also gotten eight games of the Rays’ excellent defense.
The disparity is even worse when you look at the these rates compared to the parks’ regular season figures:
While Globe Life has seen its rate jump by 7.5 percentage points here in the postseason, the last number in the above chart — the p-value — reminds us to stay grounded before making rash judgements about the field’s seemingly-odd postseason tendencies. (It’s certainly a good reminder for myself, considering I tweeted that Globe Life “should move its fences in” after Taylor’s fly ball was caught last night.) This doesn’t rule out Globe Life Field from playing big; rather, it says that given the sample size we have at the moment, there’d be an 18 percent chance of seeing a crushed-but-out rate as extreme as we have seen so far in the playoffs. That’s not too outrageous, and thus not statistically significant.
That could be the end of the analysis right there: Globe Life has played weird, but it’s still too soon to draw any firm conclusions, especially when you consider all of the meaning they built into their field dimensions. (It’s 407 feet to center field because Iván Rodríguez wore No. 7! You can’t change that.) But I wasn’t satisfied with “the sample size is too small” as my answer quite yet, even if that very well could be it.
So, the next thing I did was I looked at all 30 ballparks — err, 29, since Statcast data can’t be queried for Sahlen Field for some reason — and applied the same criteria. How often were batted balls with an xwOBA of at least .500 turned into outs at Globe Life Field compared to other ballparks? The league-average rate was 25.5 percent during the regular season, so Globe Life’s 26.7 percent mark only ranked as the 12th-highest. (Petco, for comparison, ranked fourth.)
I then considered what impact the home team’s defense had on the crushed-but-out rate. Busch Stadium, for example, ranked first in the majors in this stat during the regular season, with 32 percent of crushed balls being turned into outs. Surely some of this was due to the Cardinals’ defense, and yes, there appears to be a pretty decent correlation between home team defense and how often the ballpark turns crushed batted balls into outs, as you’d expect:
If you’re confused about the point all the way on the left side, I was too. The Phillies somehow managed to pull off a season-long defensive efficiency on line drives and fly balls of just .572, an incredible 46 points below the second-worst team (Rockies, .618). For this analysis, I considered the Phillies an outlier and ran my regression based on the other 28 teams. (The Blue Jays were already excluded due to the query’s lack of data.)
There was an r-squared of .322 to describe the correlation between home team defensive efficiency and ballpark crushed-but-out rate. It explains quite a bit of the variation, but not all of it, and that makes sense: Some of the variation has to be explained by the parks themselves, and some of it also has to be explained by the away team defense, too. (It was just a lot less feasible to look at defensive efficiency by ballpark, so I’m sticking with home team defense as a proxy.)
We can then regress the data and calculate residuals to figure out which ballparks saw the highest crushed-but-out rates even after adjusting for their home team’s defense. Here were the top five:
It’s interesting to see Comerica Park at the top of this list, considering I once wrote about Nick Castellanos’ complaints of the park’s pitcher-friendly nature. (I now disagree with the conclusion I made at the time, I do think the park was negatively affecting him beyond what park-adjusted stats would show.) But, more importantly, Globe Life is nowhere to be found: In fact, the park actually turned in about two percentage points lower than expected based on the Rangers’ defense. Simply, more hits fell than what we would have expected.
There is one more thing that we can consider, though: launch direction. Of the 27 outs that were recorded on these crushed balls during the postseason, 12 were considered to be “straightaway.” Does Globe Life Field only have a center field problem? If we change the denominator to consider all .500+ xwOBA batted balls that went “straightaway,” we find that 38.7 percent during the regular season went for outs here. In other words, nearly four-in-10 of the batted balls hit to center field with an expected wOBA of at least .500 went for an out at Globe Life Field.
I re-ran the analyses to only look at balls hit “straightaway” for all ballparks. (I couldn’t find an exact definition of this, but it’s almost certainly balls hit to straight center.) As you’d expect, in all 30 ballparks, outs were more common among crushed balls to center field than they were overall, but here again, there was no specific tell about Globe Life Field. The park ranked 12th in difference between raw straightaway crushed-but-out rate and overall crushed-but-out rate, and also 12th in regressed difference. It was a little bit more pitcher friendly than average, but nothing crazy.
So should we be concerned about Globe Life Field? All indications point to no. What we’ve seen in the postseason so far is a bit odd, but it’s likely some combination of improved defense, the luck factor and a small sample of batted balls. While this answer might be unsatisfying, it’s a good reminder to avoid overreacting to small samples, even when everything is under a microscope in the postseason.
Devan Fink is a sophomore at Dartmouth College and a Contributor at Beyond The Box Score. Previous work of his can be found at FanGraphs and his own personal blog, Cover Those Bases. You can follow him on Twitter @DevanFink.