Worst Diary Hijack ever?

I’ve been banging the drum for a long while now about how bad Dodd is.

It is not just AA being a new level: when you look at each team’s home SLG, OPS, and HR-rate in AA, the Defenders was significantly lower than the other teams. For one thing, when I studied the differences after the 2006 season, the SLG for Connecticut batters is much lower at home (83% of league average) and yet is basically league average (98%) on the road. Next lowest home SLG for a team was 95%, with 10 of the 11 other teams range from 95% to 106%.

Similarly for HR power, their AB/HR was 56% of league average at home and yet 97% league average on the road. Next lowest was 79% and 6 of 11 ranged from 86% to 102%, so there were a lot of extremes in this league. Still, the difference between the Defenders and the next lowest was as wide a range as from the next to the top of the mid-tier range, covering 9 teams – there were two much above teams,

ISO: 69% at home, 104% on the road. 93% was the next lowest, and range for 8 of 11 other teams was 95% to 106% at home.

XBH%: 85% at home, 108% on the road. Next lowest was 92%, 8 of 11 other teams ranged from 94% to 104% at home.

In all cases, our team was significantly worse than any other team’s home stats. Now, you could blame this on our AA team being significantly worse than the other teams, but as I noted, their road numbers are pretty much average and other teams coming into Dodd Stadium suffer just as badly, when you look at our pitchers stats there, it is almost a mirror image of how poorly our hitters did there.

The players blame the cold probably because they are young and inexperienced and thus are unable to name exactly what it is that bothers them so about hitting in Dodd, though Bowker was savvy enough to know what was wrong about Municipal Stadium when he was interviewed by MiLB about the problems hitting there. There is something seriously wrong about hitting there, whether it is the cold or any other reasons players might have suggested.

To call them “crybabies” smack of journalistic hubris, Joe obviously hasn’t studied the clearly evident statistical anomaly of hitting in Dodd, so it is shameful that he has to be reduced to name calling in order to write in a public newspaper. I understand public pride and wanting to protect your home turf, but sometimes things are not great where you live and digging your head in the sand and using childish name calling publicly does not seem to be the right thing to do, particularly if you are a journalist (oh, I’m sorry, perhaps he’s a columnist and allowed to do that; it’s still childish).

It is no worse than their GM, who told me in a reply when I asked him what he was going to do about the park, that even if this is true, players should instead focus on hitting into the gaps and running like heck. Tell that to Bengie Molina or any other power hitters who can’t run a lick.

Then, to make it worse, they could have resodded the field – they had to do it anyway, it was in their contract – so that the fences would be closer, but ESPN or Showtime (don’t remember who) paid them some money in order to film that show about the Yankees and for some reason that was reason enough not to resod into a new configuration but keep the old configuration.

I think that would have been trying to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, but at least it would have been an attempt to make things more normal for our prospects.

So I’ll be more than happy when the Giants announce a new AA affiliation, perhaps the new place could be worse, but I’m betting that it would have to be an improvement, they could move to almost any other park in the Eastern League and it would be a huge improvement.

About San Jose, all I can say is that I saw one of the most mammoth homers I’ve ever seen hit by Travis Ishikawa there a couple of years ago and he’s a lefty. If the winds were holding up that ball, then that ball could have flew into orbit, he just mashed it and it would have been a splash hit in AT&T if the wind was holding it back.