OPS (On Base Plus Slugging averages): see the previous two posts with top batters derived from baseball-reference.com. I used those two lists to create a spreadsheet in Google Docs.
Click this link to view detailed data.
OPS road and home ranks are shown and percent difference between road and home OPS. Only these batters had lower OPS home than road:
Lou Gehrig -4.17%
DiMaggio -7.59%
Ty Cobb - 3.63%
Mike Piazza -8.33%
The new baseball-reference.com "play index" platoon slits starts in 1916 for some reason so data for Cobb and Tris Speaker is not complete. Cobb started in 1905, Speaker 1907.
The batters are being compared to themselves. I'm guessing that the home advantage is primarily due to the ball park and the absurd baseball non uniform playing areas, which combined with baseball's non-symmetrical and/or asymmetrical advantage for left handed batters, makes it less fair and more un-American than either football or basketball.
name road home OPS Dif%
Ruth 1 1 2.96%
Gehrig 2 8 -4.17%
Williams 3 2 6.10%
Bonds 4 6 2.89%
Pujols 5 10 1.28%
DiMaggio 6 46 -7.59%
Hornsby 7 9 3.61%
Ramirez 8 18 1.42%
McGwire 9 20 2.16%
Foxx 10 4 15.53%
Cobb 11 54 -3.63%
Piazza 12 102 -8.33%
Mantle 13 19 4.07%
Berkman 14 34 0.53%
Musial 15 14 6.89%
Cabrera 16 23 4.93%
Mays 17 36 2.36%
Rodriguez 23 27 5.10%
Aaron 24 48 1.63%
Greenberg x 3 22.92%
Walker x 5 23.47%
Helton x 7 22.69%
Speaker x 13 16.76%
Babe Ruth is number one, both home and road. Further highlighting the one advantage that Mutt Mantle provided to his son Mickey by forcing Mickey to switch hit is avoiding the fate of the great Joe DiMaggio whose ranks are 6/46 and OPS percent difference -7.59%, second biggest deficit to Mike Piazza's -8.33%.
Among the top road warriors, Jimmie Foxx has by far the biggest home advantage: 15.53%; next is Stan Musial at 6.89%, then Ted Williams 6.10%.
The bottom four were among the home OPS leaders but were so low in road OPS that I didn't bother to get their ranks. For me this pretty much demolishes any Hall of Fame talk about Larry Walker and Todd Helton, both tainted by the altitude friendly park in Colorado with home OPS percent advantages of 23%. Walker played 10 of 17 seasons in Colorado, Helton all 17.
Finally, the road rank and road OPS for the three best hitters from the 1950s and 1960s:
Mickey Mantle 13 .958
Willie Mays 17 .931
Hank Aaron 24 .921
Just a bit more support for my contention that: Mantle was a better hitter than Mays and that Mays was a better hitter than Aaron.
1 comment:
You claim baseball is "Un-American" because unequal playing fields are unfair.
The U.S.A. ranks below at least 60 other countries in income equality and Americans have less economic mobility than do Canadians and most western Europeans. So a lack of equal playing fields seems perfectly American to me.
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