I’m not sure exactly when I became so confident in being able to write about baseball and not sound like a complete idiot. Every now and then, I’ll lapse into idiocy, of course. Hopefully, I’m not too much of a lay down the law type that people will be too afraid to call me out for it.

I left my big spreadsheet that I was working on – instead of working – on my work computer and then I hat all these things going on yesterday night

you know plus I had to cry and such

how long a soft tossing lefty can have as an extended career (see Jamie Moyer). Francis has done well at Coors Field, and actually worse on the Road…which is part of my point of the adjustments to and from sea level. I think they will affect a soft tossing pitcher more.

Any Rockie pitcher should have a better ERA at Coors Field then the NL average..as they are used to the adjustments that have to be made. Not saying it’s easy or that it’s not an adjustment…but they would be doing it every couple of weeks…while most NL pitchers would do it only once…and I would assume not be use to it.

In fact I really think Francis would be a very good pitcher Iif he’s healthy) for say the Mariners, or the A’s then he ever would be for the Rockies. And while this could be said about any pitcher, I think it goes double for a soft tossing lefty. It’s why when I say we should trade Jeff, I usually add….“and we shouldn’t look back as he goes on to have a very good career”

I don’t know what that means, so I’m going to assume you’re disagreeing with me or something.

Cook is a groundballer. He doesn’t give up a lot of home runs, either. That’s the way he pitches.

He made 16 starts in Coors Field. I think you can trust those numbers, provided you’re just talking about the 2008 season

He made 2 starts in Chase Field
He made 2 starts in PetCo
He made 1 start in Dodger Stadium
He made 1 start in AT&T Park.

Those sample sizes are FAR too small to try and say that Cook’s numbers are horribly deflated by pitching all of 4 starts in super pitcher friendly parks.

You’re also conveniently leaving out Chase Field, which plays as a hard hitter’s park too.

Cook’s 2 starts in Chase resulted in 11.0IP, a 6.55 ERA, 2.27 WHIP, and opponents batted 3.83 off of him.

You can’t just take 4 starts and say that the NL West is some pitcher’s paradise. Especially not with Aaron Cook. He’s not a normal pitcher. Very low K rates and very low HR rates mean he’s getting a lot of groundball contact, which has very little to do with the park you’re in. (What happens after contact may, however, but I’d wager it’s not statistically significant).

Here are ESPN’s park effects, pasted below.

Park Name Runs HR H 2B 3B BB
Coors Field (Denver, Colorado) 1.126 1.299 1.098 1.048 1.387 0.919
Chase Field (Phoenix, Arizona) 1.135 1.068 1.072 1.242 1.406 0.955
AT&T Park (San Francisco, California) 1.045 0.992 1.014 1.132 1.875 1.029
Dodger Stadium (Los Angeles, California) 0.842 0.857 0.892 0.866 0.425 0.891
Petco Park (San Diego, California) 0.796 0.743 0.896 0.78 0.931 1.024

More home runs were hit in Chase Field than the rest of the division. It was 2nd in the majors. Coors was 3rd. More home runs were hit in Coors Field than in 27 other ballparks in the majors. And all of those home runs were given up by pitchers. Yes, some were just more home run prone, period, but I’m going to need many multi-year data sets with statistically relevant amounts of innings pitched in Coors and then contrasted with other parks before you can convince me that park effects don’t change the result of batted balls. Because everything I’ve cited so far says they do.