{"id":850,"date":"2018-06-30T13:50:03","date_gmt":"2018-06-30T20:50:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mfooz.com\/bblog\/?p=850"},"modified":"2018-06-30T13:50:03","modified_gmt":"2018-06-30T20:50:03","slug":"hitterpitcher-friendly-leagues","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mfooz.com\/bblog\/?p=850","title":{"rendered":"Hitter\/Pitcher-Friendly Leagues"},"content":{"rendered":"

I had a random thought about the differences between minor leagues in terms of being hitter-friendly or pitcher-friendly. I’ve often read qualifications of individual performances, for example, “he’s hitting well, especially since that’s a pitchers’ league,” or “his ERA is not bad, considering that he’s in a hitter-friendly league.” So I decided to go to the stats. I chose to compute the averages of the last five complete regular seasons, 2013-2017. But which stats to use? Runs per game? ERA? Batting average? I decided to compile OPS and ERA as the measurements for hitting and pitching, respectively. I knew that the two would be highly correlated, and that was indeed the case. I really didn’t see anything interesting by considering both stats together, so I simply sorted the leagues by OPS. The data appears in the table below.<\/p>\n

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I was surprised to see the huge difference between the top and the bottom: 126 points of OPS, 1.59 earned runs! The next surprise was that the leagues don’t cluster much by level. The Rookie leagues are all over the map. <\/p>\n

I had a few ideas to explain the differences, then the Commish suggested a few others. Here’s a list of possible explanations.<\/p>\n