As I mentioned in last night’s hastily-posted and hastily-removed game thread (removed because there was no game, natch), the Pirates ridiculous home/road split kind of baffles me. This year, the Pirates are 23-26 at home and a dismal 11-38 on the road, which is bad in a dystopian-future ruled by robot police with government-mandated drugs and weird white limbo-prisons sort of way (h/t Sarah for making the connection that my fried neurons missed the first time around).
It’s not exactly unusual for a team to be better at home than on the road. Finding perfectly up-to-date data on this without running the numbers in myself isn’t exactly easy, but in most seasons home teams win about 54% of the time. If you flip that statement around a bit, that means that home wins account for about 54% of all wins across baseball. This year, 23 of the Pirates’ 34 wins have come at home, a whopping 67.6%. The Pirates have had a pretty pronounced home/road split every year since 2006, but how do those splits fare keeping the 54% mark in mind?
- 2009: 62 wins overall, 40 at home (64.5%)
- 2008: 67 wins overall, 39 at home (58.2%)
- 2007: 68 wins overall, 37 at home (54.4%)
- 2006: 67 wins overall, 43 at home (64.2%)
Maybe this is just statistical noise. The Pirates were much better at home in 2001 than on the road (38 of their 62 wins came at home that year, but that could be expected given that it was PNC Park’s first year and the crowds were generally huge and there was a lot of excitement around the new park), but between 2002 and 2005 home wins accounted for just 52.4% of the Pirates’ wins, slightly below what we might expect.
Let’s assume for a second, though, that this is indicative of something. That means we have to start with a basic question: Are the Pirates a very good home team (speaking relatively and meaning that they have a bigger home field advantage than most of the league, not that they’re actually a good team at home) or a very, very bad road team?
If the Pirates are a good home team, that would suggest that the Pirates have had something that gives them a distinct home field advantage as compared to the rest of the league over the last thre five seasons (or, at least in four of them). The Pirates have changed front offices, coaching staffs, and pretty much all of their position players over that time. The only real constants on the team since 2006 are two left-handed pitchers, Zach Duke and Paul Maholm, and PNC Park.
Fans tend to fixate on PNC’s “short porch” in right field and what that means to left-handed batters, but in truth 320 feet down the line isn’t much closer than most other parks and the big 21-foot wall out there makes up for some of the difference in distance. The reason the park is viewed as “lefty-friendly” is because it isn’t righty-friendly. The left field foul pole is a standard 325, but the fence angles sharply back to make it deeper than most parks in left-center (the numbers on the wall aren’t always accurate, but it’s listed between 378 and 389 for a part of the park where 375 is standard) and then keeps going back to 410 in the North-Side Notch in deep left center.
So the park is rough on right-handed hitters, who populate the lineup against left-handed pitchers. Zach Duke has been much better at PNC Park than away from it. So has Paul Maholm. For that matter, so was Tom Gorzelanny. Of course, that doesn’t completely answer our question because other teams start left-handed pitchers, too. Maybe not as many as the Bucs do in some years, but the home/road differential is as pronounced as ever this year and Paul Maholm was the only lefty in the rotation for a decent chunk of the season.
The other thing we can do here is look at runs scored and allowed at home and figure out how many Pythagorean wins the Pirates have had and see if anything stands out.
- 2010: 23 home wins, 19 Pythagorean
- 2009: 40 home wins, 41 Pythagorean
- 2008: 39 home wins, 36 Pythagorean
- 2007: 37 home wins, 38 Pythagorean
- 2006: 43 home wins, 41 Pythagorean
Nothing to see here, really. They’ve won a handful more games than the Pythagorean record suggests they should’ve, but not enough to significantly shift things around here and not in any particular pattern and not more than you might expect given the distinct advantage that batting last gives a team in close games.
The only other thing that I can even think to suggest is that the unique PNC Park outfield. It’s pretty non-traditional from line to line, starting with the box seats that sharply extend out behind first and third base, and then moving from the weirdly angled left field fence and the short fences all the way around in left, the vast expanse of the North Side Notch, all the way across to the chain-link fence on the big wall in right, that the Pirates may gain an advantage there as well. The problem is that they haven’t really had many even average outfield defenders over the past few years, with the exception of Chris Duffy, Andrew McCutchen, and probably Jose Tabata (who’s barely played enough to figure in to this trend). Or maybe the wacky outfield shifts really do bear some fruit at home, which would presumably be the place that the staff has them fine-tuned the best (though this of course wouldn’t apply to the Jim Tracy years of 2006 or 2007).
Proving that the cause of this split is that they’re an atypically bad road team is much more difficult. Having the worst road record in the league for two years running is bad, but when it’s all said and done there’s an awfully good chance that the Pirates will have the worst overall record in baseball over the last two years, too. It doesn’t seem too crazy for those two things to go hand in hand. Generally speaking, the average “road park” that they play in should have a neutral park factor, given that they play in a bunch of different stadiums that should average themselves out. If there’s one particular type of park that doesn’t favor the Pirates, it should be balanced out by the other parks the Pirates’ play in, at least in theory. This doesn’t hold completely true thanks to unbalanced schedules, but the NL Central parks are on the whole about neutral (Wrigley is very hitter-friendly, Miller is pretty pitcher-friendly, GABP skews slightly towards hitters, Busch trends slightly towards pitchers, and Minute Maid is about neutral) so I don’t think it’s that.
The team and manager turnover over the last five years make it harder to pin down a real explanation. Is it because the team over the last two year’s has been so young that they’re not comfortable on the road? Well, they weren’t that young in 2007 and anyways, some of the bigger crowds at PNC Park have had huge percentages of road fans. Is it the way John Russell handles the bullpen or platoons? If it is, Jim Tracy made similar mistakes. Is it the composition of Neal Huntington’s team? If it is, Dave Littlefield’s teams had the same problem. If there is some underlying factor that’s affecting road performance, it’s not something that’s plainly obvious. Chuck Finder tackled the same topic in the PG today and Neal Huntington admits as much (Finder’s story gives a good overall read of the problem, how the run differentials shift home and away, etc., which I was going to cover in this post but won’t since his has story has shown up since I’ve started work on this post)
Of course, the alternative is scary. If the big home road split isn’t noise and it exists not because the Pirates are a bad road team but because they’re an exceptionally good home team (again, relatively speaking) that knows how to use PNC Park to their advantage, then they’ve actually been worse than their record indicates the last couple seasons.
Add The Sports Daily to your Google News Feed!
