“They’re (park factors) not consistent because 80 games just isn’t enough to get a true read on anything. In general, I don’t use INDIVIDUAL home/road splits at all, and I would argue that it is normally inappropriate to use them. What we are concerned with is the VALUE of what the player has done. That isn’t dependent on his individual home/road stats.

Suppose that were a player who, playing in a neutral park, hit .350 with 20 home runs at home, but .250 with 10 home runs on the road, while a teammate hits .300 home and road with 15 homers each
place. Things like that do happen all the time, but suppose that this was a CONSISTENT effect, rather than an anomaly as it almost always is. Would one player be more valuable than the other? No, he wouldn’t, or at least not appreciably more valuable. The player’s value depends on the ratio between the runs he creates and run context in which he performs. His idiosyncratic tendencies are irrelevant.

The textbook case here is the two Yankee catchers, Elston Howard and Bill Dickey. Both were Yankee catchers, careers of similar length, and both of them had brilliant four-year stretches relatively late in their careers 1936-39 for Dickey, 1961-64 for Howard. What many people don’t know is that Dickey
was tremendously helped by playing in Yankee Stadium, while Howard was tremendously hurt by playing in the same park. In road games, Howard had not only more power than Dickey, but vastly more power…as I recall, Howard out homered Dickey in road games about 2 to 1. Taking ALL offense into account, Howard on the road may have been a better hitter than Dickey…not sure if that is true, but if he wasn’t better, he was certainly very close.

But does this make Howard “actually” better than Bill Dickey? No, it doesn’t, because REAL BASEBALL GAMES WERE WON BY DICKEY’S ABILITY TO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THE PARK. If you adjust Dickey’s advantage out of existence because it is a park “illusion”–which it is–then you are adjusting real wins out of existence. You can’t do that. So you have to live with the conclusion that Dickey was better than Howard. He was better because he had a superior ability to take advantage of the park–even though it was the same park, and had essentially the same hitting characteristics in Howard’s time that it did in
Dickey’s.”

Bill