The Updated Factor Grid

Perhaps you recognize the Factor Grid. It’s an important part of my column – The Daily Grind –  which will return in a little over a week. The grid is a quick look at the most important park factors for a given day – home runs by handedness, weather, and notes on extenuating circumstances (i.e. rain or snow). There are any number of fantasy websites with overcomplicated analysis of daily park factors and matchups – usually behind a paywall. I prefer a simple spreadsheet.

The Factor Grid can be easily used to select hitters in the best offensive venues and pitchers in defense friendly environments. This has obvious use to DFS participants, but it’s also helpful to traditional fantasy owners who like to stream or have a deep bench.

Let’s move onto the grid (or use the link):

The data comes from FanGraphs Guts! I have doubled the park factors so that they’re stadium specific. This introduces some small rounding errors (+/- 1). Guts! has the park factors halved by default so they can be used to transform full season player data. We don’t care about full season applications which is why I’ve doubled them.

I’ve color coded each stadium for a neutral weather day. Green means good for hitters while red is good for pitchers. Eleven stadiums are generally offense friendly, six are mostly neutral, and 10 are pitcher friendly. Progressive Field and Fenway Park have unusual factors which allow them to play are both friendly and unfriendly to hitters based on handedness. Wrigley Field has strong wind effects.

Weather can affect the color coding. As we all know, Wrigley park is very pitcher friendly early in the season due to cold weather and inward winds. Once summer rolls around, the winds blow out and the balls fly. The park will usually be listed as green or red rather than yellow. Particularly unpleasant weather could bump any neutral park down to a pitcher friendly rating. A very fine day could bump a neutral park into the green.

We can use park factors in the offseason too – specifically for players who are changing venues. Last year, I used Josh Donaldson’s move from the Coliseum to the Rogers Centre as an example. We know how that went. This year, Neil Walker is moving from a park with a 76 factor for home runs to a stadium with a 104 factor. Aaron Hicks is swapping Target Field’s 88 home run factor for Yankee Stadium’s 122 factor. Other hitters who could benefit include Justin Upton, Jason Heyward, Mark Trumbo, Brett Lawrie, Austin Jackson, and Jimmy Rollins.

This year, two parks have new dimensions which means that the old park factors can’t be fully trusted. We should see a few more home runs in Miami while the Rockies are trying to cut down on big flies.

That covers the basics. Now, onto questions.