Short grass infield - statistical relevance

by bushe on Feb 26, 2009 1:30 PM CST Comment 3 comments

A while ago I promised to do some number crunching on whether the short grass in the Ranger's infield has an effect on the number of errors and other types of hits given up in the ballpark. Here are my results:

Team & Location	Balls in Play	Grounders	Outs	Balls Through Infield	Infield Hits	Fielding Errors
Rangers in Arlington	2328	922	669	183	49	17
Rangers Elsewhere	2359	953	699	165	63	18
Opponents in Arlington	2526	1004	720	193	54	28
Opponents Elsewhere	2413	1053	754	192	73	25

Team & Location	GB%	Out% for GBs	IFH%	F%	GB to OF%
Rangers in Arlington	39.604811	72.55965	5.31	0.975218659	19.84816
Rangers Elsewhere	40.3984739	73.34732	6.61	0.974895397	17.31375
Opponents in Arlington	39.746635	71.71315	5.38	0.962566845	19.22311
Opponents Elsewhere	43.6386241	71.60494	6.93	0.967907574	18.23362

To sum it up it doesn't appear that there is much effect if any on fielding percentage and it looks like the fast turf actually cuts back infield hits. It does this by noticably increasing the percentage of grounders that get to the outfield. At home the rangers were a full 2.5% more likely to get a grounder through the infield, while the opponents only increased by 1%.

We already knew this but this chart also further reinforces just how bad the infield defense was this past year as the Out% when the Rangers were hitting is much higher than when they weren't.

Some caveats - There are 6-10 or so grounders that aren't accounted for in each group, dunno but if anyone really wants to know I can try to look.

All thanks to retrosheet.org fantastic site.

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