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Introducing Ballpark Overlay Tool (Beta)
By Capitol Avenue Club | January 2, 2010
Introducing Ballpark Overlay Tool (Beta)
The scene:
You’re in a bar (or on an internet message board) talking about a player changing (or potentially changing) teams during the off-season. The hitter has serious power, but you’re not sure how well the power will translate from their hitters’ park to your team’s pitchers’ park. How many of those HR’s will your team’s home park eat?
Well, fear not, because I’ve developed a tool that helps you do something to attempt to answer that question in a visual manner.
What you need:
First of all, you need Adobe Photoshop. I used the CS2 version to develop this tool, but any version should work. There are a number of ways to acquire Photoshop, both legal and illicit. I’d encourage you to purchase a copy (the legal way), though I’m not here to help Adobe’s cause or judge anyone. Secondly, you need access to Hit Tracker Online. Third, the Ballpark Overlay Tool (Beta).
How does this work?:
Open the Ballpark Overlay Tool in Photoshop. Somewhere on your screen, you’ll see a small window called “Layers”. Layers are basically Photoshop’s way of stacking images, which creates infinite utility. There are 31 layers in this Photoshop file, one for each ballpark that will be used for major league baseball games in 2010, and a thirty-first layer reserved for a player’s Home Run chart from Hit Tracker Online (dubbed “PlayerImage”). You have the option of hiding or showing each layer. When you open the file, the only layer that is visible is the aforementioned thirty-first layer. It’s Jordan Schafer’s 2009 Home Run chart.
Assuming Jordan Schafer’s two home runs aren’t what you’re looking to analyze, you’ll need to change the image in that layer. To do this, simply go to Hit Tracker Online and find the chart you want to use. With the “PlayerImage” layer selected in Photoshop, copy the image of the Home Run chart you wish to study and paste it into the file. You now should be looking at the image you just saw on Hit Tracker Online, except in Photoshop.
Now, to add a ballpark’s overlay to the diagram, simply return to the “Layers” window, find the park you’re looking for (they’re all appropriately named), and click the box in the left column corresponding to the layer. Voila, a translucent, colored overlay of that ballpark should be displayed on top of the player’s Home Run chart.
A few things of note:
One, the opacity of the first 11 ballparks in the file is inconsistent with that of the other 19. If this is a problem, the opacity of the aforementioned 19 can be adjusted down (more transparent), though the opacity can’t be adjusted up for the first 11. This is something I intend to correct for the next release.
Two, if you want to view multiple overlays, simply check multiple boxes. The first layer in the “Layers” window is the top one displayed, arrange them as you see fit.
Three, I highly recommend keeping an archived version of this file and a working copy. When you first download the file, save it in a convenient directory, open it, and save it under a different file name in another (or the same) directory. Use one to play around with, create images, etc… Use the other one to recover the file should you accidentally flatten the image or something.
Let’s try it:
Let’s say we want to see how Troy Glaus’s ’08 home runs would look in Turner Field. First, open the Ballpark Overlay Tool in Photoshop and select the “PlayerImage” layer. Then go to Hit Tracker Online and pull up Glaus’s home run chart from ’08. Copy, paste into Photoshop. Then, in the layers window, un-hide the “Turner Field” layer. You should have something that looks like this:
Looks alright to me.
Another. Johnny Damon has recently been linked to the Braves. I certainly can’t complain about the .366 on base average he’s posted the past 6 years, but how many of the 24 home runs he hit last year would actually be home runs if he played his home games in a more pitcher-friendly ballpark? As we did earlier, open the file in Photoshop, select the “PlayerImage” layer, go to Hit Tracker Online, copy Damon’s Home Run chart, and paste it into the appropriate layer. This time, however, I want to use two ballpark overlays, one of New Yankee Stadium, one of Turner Field. So, I un-hide both Turner Field and New Yankee Stadium. As I mentioned earlier, the opacity is a problem, here, so I need to do something to correct it. First of all, I put Turner Field’s overlay on top of Yankee Stadium’s, which makes it a bit easier to see. Then, I select the New Yankee Stadium layer and change the opacity to 75%. The result:
Looks like the New Yankee Stadium did, in fact, help him out quite a bit.
Play around with it, see what you can come up with. I hope you enjoy using it.
Special thanks to Hit Tracker Online for providing the graphs and the inspiration and Andrew Clem for ballpark dimensions. Please credit both Hit Tracker Online and Andrew Clem, in addition to Capitol Avenue Club, if you publish anything using this tool.
In the next version, I’ll have more ballparks (old ones), updated visualizations, and a few other tweaks. I wish I could tell you when I expect to have it done.
Topics: Atlanta Braves | 27 Comments »
January 2nd, 2010 at 11:23 PM
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Atlanta Braves Buzz and Capitol Avenue Club, Capitol Avenue Club. Capitol Avenue Club said: New Post: Introducing Ballpark Overlay Tool (Beta) http://capitolavenueclub.com/?p=1734 [...]
January 2nd, 2010 at 11:26 PM
Very cool. Thank you for putting it together.
January 2nd, 2010 at 11:34 PM
Not a problem, thanks for stopping by.
January 3rd, 2010 at 12:47 AM
Thats cool!! but something came to mind soon as i read it what bout pithers and the homeruns they give up in Turner Field compared to other ballparks and vice versa? Thanks again insight!
January 3rd, 2010 at 6:25 AM
Good idea.
I think it should be noted, however (NERD ALERT!), that in using this for analysis one can’t just say, “X amount of Player’s homers in Old Ballpark would not have been homers in New Ballpark, so he should be expected to hit X less home runs.”
Albert Pujols, one of the most consistent power hitters in the game, has a standard deviation of 6 HR per season with an average of 41. That means that roughly 68% of the time, we expect Pujols to hit between 35-47 HR, and 29-53 HR 95% of the time. So, if he was moving to Seattle, we could point out that X amount of his HR wouldn’t have cleared the fence at Safeco, but he would have to have hit a lot of cheapies for it to affect our analysis of his power output.
This overlay analysis requires one to effectively chop the available sample size in half, which certainly raises the uncertainty level, especially with younger players.
Like I said, this is a good idea and it’s awesome that you did all of the heavy lifting, but I don’t want to read analyses in the future using this as a stone-cold lead pipe lock, as Mike & Mike would say.
January 3rd, 2010 at 7:39 AM
Bill, yes that’s correct.
There’s also plenty of other factors, including wind, fence height, etc. That a simple overlay can’t do nearly enough to account for.
I meant to write a section on the limitations of this and properly interpreting the graphs. I forgot in my haste to publish it, I guess.
Thanks for stopping by.
January 3rd, 2010 at 11:22 AM
[...] – from the very good Atlanta Braves blog Capital Avenue Club – put together a neat tool that allows you to look at a player’s home run landing spots relative to different ballparks, so [...]
January 3rd, 2010 at 2:26 PM
FYI, you don’t need Photoshop. GIMP is free and can display the individual layers in this document.
http://www.gimp.org/
January 3rd, 2010 at 3:07 PM
This is great. Thanks for putting it together, and including the detailed instructions(which I would have been lost without).
January 3rd, 2010 at 3:24 PM
Thanks for sharing that, Sean. That’ll certainly make this tool more accessable.
January 3rd, 2010 at 6:35 PM
Are these dimension actual ball park size or are they the “reported” dimensions found on the OF walls?
January 3rd, 2010 at 7:25 PM
Where did you get the field measurements from?
January 3rd, 2010 at 10:11 PM
[...] the original here: Introducing Ballpark Overlay Tool (Beta) | Capitol Avenue Club Posted in Tool | Tags: a-player-changing, ballpark, ballpark-overlay, internet-message, [...]
January 3rd, 2010 at 10:34 PM
tferr and Ryan L,
I got the measurements from Andrew Clem, whose site and ballpark measurements are linked in the article.
January 4th, 2010 at 1:21 AM
What about long fly balls in pitchers parks that didn’t go for home runs, but would have in an otherwise small park?
January 4th, 2010 at 5:21 AM
That’s something you’re going to have to figure out for yourself, Dan. Apologies.
January 4th, 2010 at 8:53 AM
Fantastic work.
January 4th, 2010 at 8:55 AM
RE: long fly balls, HitTracker also allows you to graph fly outs for a player/year. So if you want to see how many of Casey Kotchman’s fly ball outs in 2009 would have been HRs if he had stayed in Anaheim just copy that image instead of the HR tracker image. You’ll have to do two passes to get player HRs and player F7-8-9s but you should be able to put it together pretty quickly.
January 4th, 2010 at 1:07 PM
Thanks for sharing that and the kind words, Sam. That’s very helpful.
January 5th, 2010 at 3:58 PM
Thanks, Sam. Didn’t know you could do that.
January 5th, 2010 at 4:01 PM
Sam:
How exactly do you get long fly balls to appear? I don’t see it anywhere on the player pages.
January 5th, 2010 at 4:14 PM
Although I have researched a number of players on a project basis, comprehensive long fly data is not on my site for 2006-09, unfortunately. You’ll have to wait a bit longer for that data to become available. Hopefully not very long, though…
January 5th, 2010 at 4:18 PM
Social comments and analytics for this post…
This post was mentioned on Twitter by CapitolAvenue: New Post: Introducing Ballpark Overlay Tool (Beta) http://capitolavenueclub.com/?p=1734...
January 6th, 2010 at 12:01 AM
[...] to determine just how many of his home runs would have stayed in other parks. That is, until the Ballpark Overlay Tool. Using this and Hit Tracker, we can see how the same hits would have landed in other home [...]
January 6th, 2010 at 4:27 PM
Thanks, Greg.
We’ll watch for that.
January 6th, 2010 at 6:40 PM
This is great. I’ve been doing a lot of wondering this offseason about two individuals in particular…Damon and Glaus…so this was quite convenient. Thanks.
March 4th, 2010 at 11:12 AM
[...] not so … Nice strawman there Clem. The truth is this fellow fits the teabagger [...] Want to …Introducing Ballpark Overlay Tool (Beta) | Capitol Avenue ClubIntroducing Ballpark Overlay Tool (Beta) The scene: You're in a bar (or on an internet message [...]