Friday, November 22, 2013

2013 Vegas Park Factors


There are more than a few ways of calculating park factors.  The simplest system of all and the one that tells the best story of which park played as a hitter or pitchers park based on the empirical data (actual results) is the one where you simply divide runs per game at home scored by both teams by runs per game on the road scored by both teams.  ESPN does a great job of providing this data for previous seasons.

One problem with these year to year park factors (for runs scored) is that there is a ton of noise (variance) from year to year.  It is just very difficult to pin down what the true park factor should be for each park.  Some people like to take the previous two or three seasons and weight the more recent seasons heavier to come up with a number.  This is actually a safe way of doing it and one I usually prefer.

When it comes to betting on baseball run totals (over/unders) one needs a really good idea on what a stadiums' true park factor is.  From this base park factor number you can adjust up or down based off of weather or wind conditions if you like, but you need a good park factor number for each stadium first.  The Vegas sportsbooks obviously have their own numbers and if they don't you can easily reverse engineer the numbers that they used over the course of the season for each park.  All you need to do is take all of their run total numbers and adjust for juice to come up with an over/under number for each game.  Let's say you calculate that number as 7.25 runs scored.  You do this for all games and use this 7.25 (calculated number) as a substitute for the actual number of runs that were scored in that game and calculate each teams' park factor based off of this calculated number instead of the actual total number of runs scored.  In doing so, you can get a glimpse into what Vegas used as park factors for each team and then compare their park factors with the actual empirical number.  I calculate these Vegas park factors as the season progresses as kind of a sanity check against the park factors that I use in my day to day baseball game simulations.

Below is a look at each teams' Vegas park factor and Actual 2013 park factor and the difference between the two sorted by parks that Vegas had the run environment too low on.  Just because Vegas was off on a park factor may or may not mean they were dumb on selecting their park factor for that team as like I said above there is quite a bit of noise involved here.  But it would've obviously made for some good betting opportunities.

TeamVegas PFActual 2013 PF2013 Delta
Tigers1.0221.1390.1167
Cubs1.0831.1920.1091
Phillies1.0231.1070.0838
Blue Jays1.0441.1180.0743
Mariners0.9180.9910.0733
Marlins0.9591.0300.0715
Royals1.0161.0820.0661
Astros1.0091.0740.0652
Brewers1.0461.1100.0642
Yankees1.0281.0870.0590
Twins0.9751.0200.0446
Nationals0.9691.0130.0444
Rockies1.2391.2730.0343
Orioles1.0381.0570.0187
Angels0.9640.9680.0036
Braves0.9550.9560.0008
White Sox1.0030.998-0.0050
Rays0.9410.931-0.0103
Giants0.8890.869-0.0204
Dodgers0.8960.868-0.0279
Athletics0.9190.889-0.0295
Reds1.0320.989-0.0425
Indians0.9770.933-0.0442
Padres0.8770.831-0.0461
Pirates0.9610.907-0.0535
Mets0.9410.867-0.0736
Cardinals0.9790.892-0.0868
Red Sox1.0830.960-0.1227
Diamondbacks1.0980.974-0.1237
Rangers1.1210.985-0.1357

As a further exercise I computed the RMSE for the Vegas 2013 park factors against the actual park factors for the 2013, 2012 and 2011 seasons for the fun of it.

The RMSE (sum of the squares of the 32 park factor errors)... were.....
2013 = 0.1429
2012 = 0.4396
2011 = 0.2423
(these numbers are pre-square root)

You would expect to see the 2013 number be the lowest as that is what Vegas was predicting against.  The 2012 park factors had a lot of noise as there were a few crazy outliers bringing the error total up.  The 2011 park factors did pretty well, but about where you would expect it.


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