Giants4

Individual and team home and away stats reveal that the Giants, except for a balanced Barry Bonds, hit and yield more home runs on the road:

Chart 5. Giants Home and Away

		1998		1999		2000		2001		2002		2003
		Home	Away	Home	Away	Home	Away	Home	Away	Home	Away	Home	Away
SF	BA	not available		.262	.279	.283	.273	.256	.275	.259	.273	.278	.250
	R			390	482	451	474	352	447	357	426	398	357
	2B			139	168	144	160	148	156	134	166	134	147
	3B			8	10	26	18	25	15	24	11	19	10
	HR			87	101	110	116	97	138	72	126	82	98

OPP	BA			.239	.270	.237	.267	.240	.255	.234	.245	.237	.242
	R			356	475	306	441	344	404	276	340	299	339
	HR			98	96	61	90	49	96	42	74	61	75

Chart 6. Bonds Home and Away

	Bonds	G	AB	R	H	2B	3B	HR	RBI	TB	BB	SO	OBP	SLG	AVG
2003	Home	68	195	58	72	14	1	23	41	157	85	29	.570	.805	.369
	Away	62	195	53	61	8	0	22	49	135	63	29	.490	.692	.313
2002	Home	69	188	54	66	14	2	19	44	141	88	17	.560	.750	.351
	Away	74	215	63	83	17	0	27	66	181	110	30	.600	.842	.386
2001	Home	75	224	61	75	19	0	37	71	205	80	46	.520	.915	.335
	Away	78	252	68	81	13	2	36	66	206	97	47	.510	.817	.321

After four years, I think we’re close to being able to conclude that it’s hard for most players to hit home runs in PacBell. In two of four seasons, the Giants hit better at home. Last year, they hit .028 higher at home! They were ninth in MLB in home BA and 23^rd in road BA. I don’t think that alone proves or disproves anything, but I’m willing to make two conclusions:

calling PacBell a pitchers’ park is premature.
reaching that conclusion before last year would have been a false conclusion based on insignificant data.

I tried to figure out if the Giants have been a good or bad offensive team, and if that had anything to with the statistics, but the data is somewhat inconclusive. The Giants have been in the top five teams in the league in OBP and SP every year they’ve played in PacBell (in the top three teams until last year), but they’ve averaged middle-of-the-league totals (8.5 of 16 teams) in scoring. One player grossly skews that data. Since baseball offense is about scoring, not OBP or SP, the statistics reveal the gross exaggeration of the value of Barry Bonds. However, that’s a digression.

Chart 7. Giants Rank in NL

Year	Park	R	H	2B	3B	HR	RBI	BB	SO	BA	OBP	SLG
1999	3Com	11	3	7	4	15	7	3	12	7	3	5
2000	PacBell	10	3	4	4	2	3	1	11	2	1	2
2001	PacBell	2	5	4	5	2	1	2	8	5	3	2
2002	PacBell	8	3	4	2	5	2	3	14	3	2	1
2003	PacBell	14	6	10	10	9	7	3	13	6	5	5

If current trends continue after the Giants roster has experienced significant turnover, I would conclude that PacBell takes away home runs, but helps hitters enough in other ways to be a neutral ballpark. If I were Brian Sabean, I would try to build the team on that basis.

go to Part 2.