ShockDome

Wednesday, February 04 2004 @ 12:21 PM EST

Contributed by: Leigh

In the Story on Cory thread, Dave Till wrote this:

I'm wondering whether pitchers traded to Toronto tend to go into shock when confronted with the SkyDome in April. Balls tend to fly out of the park when the roof is closed and the heat is on. An established pitcher, when he realizes that some of his routine fly balls are carrying over the left-field fence, may become discombobulated.

So, I thought I would investigate what I like to call the ShockDome factor.

This is a concern for new Jays Pat Hentgen, who has a bit of a predilection for the longball, and Ted Lilly, who has displayed full-blown acute gopheritis in the past.

There have been fourteen pitchers brought into Toronto during an offseason in the SkyDome era and given a rotation spot in the following season.

What you see below: PDHR is Pre-SkyDome homerun rate, CPDHR is Corrected Pre-SkyDome homerun rate (corrected to the Dome's 116 homerun factor), SDHR is homerun rate in the pitcher's first season at SkyDome, and ShDF is the ShockDome Factor (the difference between CPDHR and DHR). The ShockDome Factor is meant to account for the Dome's shock value, the rise in homerun rate experienced by new starting pitchers mysteriously unaccounted for by the Dome's 116 homerun factor.

Let's meet the discombobulated fourteen:

Pitcher    Year  PDHR  CPDHR  SDHR  ShDF 
Morris    1992  0.93   1.08  0.67 -0.40
Stewart   1993  0.81   0.95  1.28  0.33
Darwin    1995  0.85   0.99  1.80  0.81
Hanson    1996  0.70   0.82  1.09  0.27
Quantrill 1996  0.88   1.02  1.81  0.79
Clemens   1997  0.63   0.73  0.31 -0.42
Person    1997  1.50   1.75  1.33 -0.41
Wells     1999  1.06   1.23  1.24  0.01
Hamilton  1999  0.77   0.89  1.19  0.30
Castillo  2000  1.09   1.26  1.17 -0.09
Parris    2001  1.21   1.40  1.53  0.13
Prokopec  2002  1.64   1.90  2.38  0.48
Lidle     2003  0.96   1.11  1.12  0.01
Sturtze   2003  1.23   1.43  1.41 -0.02

El Artista does not have a homerun problem (and seems like a particularly well-adjusted individual), so there does not seem to be much cause for concern that he will be DomeShocked. Pat's been here before, so intuitively one would think that he would not be DomeShocked.

The ShockDome Factor seems to have affected Stewart, Darwin, Hanson, Quantrill, Hamilton and Prokopec most gravely. The average ShockDome factor is 0.12, which could be more significant than it seems. Does it mean that when projecting a pitcher's first season at SkyDome, we use a homerun factor of 128, rather than 116? That's one way to look at it. Does it mean that half the pitchers who come to SkyDome experience grave consequences from the ShockDome Factor? That's another way to look at it. Is it paranoia fueled by results obtained from a small sample? I hope so, for Ted's sake.

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