A Strange, Profound Offensive Depression Gripped Wrigley Field This Year. Here's Why.

[Matthew Trueblood]

The fault was not in the air of the (pitcher-)friendly confines, but in the thing flying through it.

Image courtesy of © Stan Szeto - USA Today Images

If you tuned into any Cubs games down the stretch this season, you probably heard an allusion or two by Marquee Sports Network play-by-play man Boog Sciambi to the weird weather patterns and drastic splits for the team at Wrigley Field this year. Behind the scenes, members of the Cubs themselves believe this was a real factor in their frustrating inability to consistently score runs at home this year, too. As a pivotal offseason looms, the team needs to properly evaluate its own players before deciding where to make key upgrades, and that means testing and fully comprehending those theories.

The basic math backs up both the seasoned observers and the cloak-and-dagger team apologists. Only at T-Mobile Park in Seattle did teams score fewer runs per game this year than at Wrigley, and at only four full-time parks--Oakland Coliseum, Busch Stadium, Kauffman Stadium, and Oracle Park in San Francisco--did a lower percentage of plate appearances end in home runs. That's all very unusual for the century-old ballpark, the offense-friendly reputation of which has sometimes been overstated but which has always played at least fair. It's drawn plenty of concern, because it would seem to distort the real production of players like Seiya Suzuki, Cody Bellinger, and Ian Happ. It even risks leading the team to give up too soon on hitters who go through periods of deep struggle, the way Pete Crow-Armstrong, Miguel Amaya, and--gulp--Christopher Morel did. Without getting to the bottom of the issue, it's very hard to figure out what the team should do to improve a roster that fell short of the playoffs for (in all important respects) the seventh straight season.

Let's try to do that, then. We've taken a surface-level measurement of the reality of the effect, but now, let's interrogate the nature of it. If the weather--temperature, air pressure, some funky interaction between new construction in the neighborhood and prevailing wind patterns or an overabundance of night games--were at fault, we would expect to see a wide gap between expected and actual results on batted balls. We would expect to see long fly balls die shorter, leading to long hits turning into loud outs.

That's somewhat in evidence, but only very imperfectly. As a test sample, let's take all batted balls at 95 miles per hour or harder, within a launch-angle band of 10-35 degrees. We're not using Baseball Savant's reverse-engineered formula, here, but we can call these Barrels just as credibly. If a ball is hit at least 95 MPH and is on a medium line or is a non-lazy fly ball, it was barreled, and it fits into a bucket of batted balls worthy of study for these purposes.

On such batted balls, this year, batters at Wrigley Field enjoyed the 19th-highest home-run rate, the 22nd-best BABIP, the 22nd-best OPS and the 20th-best ISO in the league. The park was, in other words, unfriendly to balls hit hard in the air, but they were closer to average than to the true bottom of the barrel. That doesn't mean it was the air quality or the wind knocking the ball down, though. The league's average exit velocity on those barreled balls at Wrigley was just the 24th-highest of the 30 parks. Using the specific speed and trajectory of each batted ball, Wrigley yielded more home runs and more triples (and fewer doubles, but by a smaller margin than the homers it added) than should have been expected. In total, 40.8% of barreled balls at Wrigley went for extra-base hits, whereas only 39.4% were expected.

No, the problem with the barrels at Wrigley was, there were radically few of them. No other park in the league saw fewer hard-hit balls in the air. The median number of such batted balls at a park, league-wide, was 736. At Wrigley, there were only 661. It's hard to blame the weather for the fact that hitters never generated the kind of batted balls weather hurts, in the first place. You could make the case, if you wanted, that the frigidity of April--there were 679 plate appearances at Wrigley that month in games in which the temperature was below 50 degrees, over 300 more than at any other park in the majors all year--made it harder for hitters to access their 'A' swings and blast the ball, but it's a bit of a reach. And even in those games, the park played essentially neutral, when the ball was well-struck in the air. It just didn't happen enough.

Let's consider another possibility, then. What if the Cubs themselves are driving this? This is a key thing to consider about the whole topic, by the way: If you're eager to excuse the Cubs hitters who didn't create enough home offense, you have to also reckon with the fact that the team's pitchers benefited from this phenomenon. Or else, maybe an underpowered Chicago batting order and a wily Chicago pitching staff helped create an environment that mirrored their own habits--a game with fewer truly zapped baseballs?

In short: it didn't happen that way. We do still need to think about the way these park effects quietly made Justin Steele, Jameson Taillon, and Shota Imanaga look better than they were, but it's not just about the Cubs being involved. As proof: the Cubs and their opponents combined to generate a Barrel Rate 4.8% higher on the road than the Cubs and their opponents at Wrigley. By far, that is the widest differential in MLB.

So, it's only fractionally weather that made Wrigley such a tough place to hit this year, and it's not the Cubs themselves, at all. What, then? We know it's not the ball. After all, the league now standardizes pre-game care for the baseballs, including providing a humidor in which the balls are stored before use. It's one safeguard put into place to blunt the differences between parks in terms of what was possible offensively.

My response to that is: Maybe the humidor sucks. Maybe the clubhouse staff are bad at using it, or Craig Counsell leaned on a dial back in April while having a conversation with Yan Gomes, and no one ever noticed he had changed the settings. I would not rule out that the ball has been deadened, inadvertently, by something in the chain of custody through which they pass at Wrigley Field. Hitters aren't lifting the ball as often, or hitting it hard as often, as they should be. It's hard to name a way that the humidor-stored baseballs and the surrounding environs could combine to kill the ball's coefficient of restitution, without making it fly less well, but maybe there's something there.

One way or another, though, hitters aren't generating good contact in the first place. That was the theme of this year at Wrigley Field--not good contact unrewarded, but surprisingly little good contact, period. Notably, the league is also hitting more ground balls than average at Wrigley this year--that is, the Cubs and their opponents hit more grounders there than when the team is on the road.

To be safe, I lopped off all games prior to May 1, and ran the same numbers. I then tried lopping off all games with a game-time temp under 60 degrees. No material changes whatsoever. Regardless of conditions, when at Wrigley, the Cubs and their opponents hit the ball harder (and hit it hard more often), hit it on the ground less (and concentrated more of their in-air contact in the best possible cluster of launch angles), and got much better results at other parks than at Wrigley.

This could be a random fluke, resolved by no remedy other than time and the slow erosion of memory. The data say, though, that there's more here than peculiar, persistent, despair-inducing weather patterns. The ball didn't do normal things at Wrigley Field this year. The team and the league should look closely at how to adjust that this winter, if possible. If not, the mystery of the extra ground balls and missing barrels will have to continue next year.

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[Bertz]

This is really interesting.  I *think* this is just this year's weird anomaly, like not being able to win on Sundays or the comical number of first inning runs.  If weather or wind was a more obvious culprit I'd be more convinced it's permanent given A) global warming and B) all the new developments around Wrigley, particularly the place across the street on Addison that's taller than the park itself.

Reading this I got curious about prior years.  So I pulled Flyballs + Line Drives by venue, and then what proportion of those were official Barrels.  It's a bit different than what you did, but mainly because it's less work rather than because I would quibble with your process.  But by this definition Wrigley ranks 19th, 16th, and 24th year by year from '22 to '24. 

I'll also note that some very good hitters parks tend to rank consistently towards the bottom here.  GABP in Cincinnati, probably the #2 hitters park in the league, ranks 30th, 28th, and 25th the last three years.  It might be a situation where hitters come out of their approach when the conditions are too favorable.  We see this at Wrigley sometimes when the wind is howling out and we still get like a 2-1 game.

[CubinNY]

It's likely more complicated than one main variable. Weather + pitching matchups + balls + ? + ?. You'd have to do a regression analysis to get the relative contributions. But first, you'd have to get all the variables. 

[Matthew Trueblood]

19 hours ago, CubinNY said:

It's likely more complicated than one main variable. Weather + pitching matchups + balls + ? + ?. You'd have to do a regression analysis to get the relative contributions. But first, you'd have to get all the variables. 

And to do that, you'd have to capture God in a birdcage and make him tell you what they all are. 😄 Yes. My method is not the end-all, be-all. Just a way of breaking things down to gain a clearer sense of what was going on, however imperfect that sense remains.

[CubinNY]

51 minutes ago, Matthew Trueblood said:

And to do that, you'd have to capture God in a birdcage and make him tell you what they all are. 😄 Yes. My method is not the end-all, be-all. Just a way of breaking things down to gain a clearer sense of what was going on, however imperfect that sense remains.

I hope you don't think I was criticizing. The weirdness of baseball is one of the things that makes it so great. 

[Matthew Trueblood]

51 minutes ago, CubinNY said:

I hope you don't think I was criticizing. The weirdness of baseball is one of the things that makes it so great. 

No, not at all! Just riffing. Yeah, the number of variables involved in this kind of question is one of the fun things about baseball, in that it makes it so inscrutable--unsolvable. 

[Joj]

Yes, the Cubs players were swinging for the fences way too much (at Wrigley and everywhere else).  That is what teams tend to do when pushing, attempting to overcome a general lack of talent.  The resulting lack of consistency hasn't been surprising.

 

[mul21]

2 minutes ago, Joj said:

Yes, the Cubs players were swinging for the fences way too much (at Wrigley and everywhere else).  That is what teams tend to do when pushing, attempting to overcome a general lack of talent.  The resulting lack of consistency hasn't been surprising.

 

If they were doing it everywhere then why are the numbers so much worse at Wrigley than on the road? The data doesn't support anything you're saying.

[We Got The Whole 9]

48 minutes ago, Joj said:

Yes, the Cubs players were swinging for the fences way too much (at Wrigley and everywhere else).  That is what teams tend to do when pushing, attempting to overcome a general lack of talent.  The resulting lack of consistency hasn't been surprising.

 

95% of the hitters in the league are coached to swing for the fences these days. It has nothing to do with overcompensating for a lack of talent; it's simply the easiest way to score runs.

[Joj]

On 10/1/2024 at 12:39 PM, We Got The Whole 9 said:

95% of the hitters in the league are coached to swing for the fences these days. It has nothing to do with overcompensating for a lack of talent; it's simply the easiest way to score runs.

BS

[Joj]

On 10/1/2024 at 11:50 AM, mul21 said:

If they were doing it everywhere then why are the numbers so much worse at Wrigley than on the road? The data doesn't support anything you're saying.

That's easy.  They were likely pushing more at home.  Goes right along with it.

Data?  Lol.

Edited October 2, 2024 by Joj

[mul21]

22 minutes ago, Joj said:

Different stadiums play differently.  Different opponents play differently.  Different game situations play differently.  Etc.  But I'm not here to teach anyone the basics of this game.  The, "data" neither supports nor undermines a fairly obvious conclusion.  If you're going to bring up, "data" use it to support something you're saying.  Not just, "Uh, you're wrong because data."

You're saying their approach is the reason for bad offensive numbers at Wrigley.  Their approach is the same pretty much everyday right?  So if the approach is the same everyday and the numbers are wildly different in away games (they are for 2024) then there has to be a park factor involved.  Especially when you look at visitor offensive numbers and those are similarly suppressed vs other parks. 

[Joj]

19 minutes ago, mul21 said:

You're saying their approach is the reason for bad offensive numbers at Wrigley.  Their approach is the same pretty much everyday right?  So if the approach is the same everyday and the numbers are wildly different in away games (they are for 2024) then there has to be a park factor involved.  Especially when you look at visitor offensive numbers and those are similarly suppressed vs other parks. 

The approach isn't the same every day.  Obviously.  Have you played sports before?

[mul21]

1 minute ago, Joj said:

The approach isn't the same every day.  Obviously.  Have you played sports before?

Okay, sure, fine, it was the players not trying hard enough during home games.🙄

[Joj]

21 hours ago, mul21 said:

Okay, sure, fine, it was the players not trying hard enough during home games.🙄

Swing and a miss!

[javy knows my name]

Ooooh, data in quotes

"Have you played the game before?"

Omnomnom gimme gimme

 

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