THE BEARD RETURNS!!! Featuring: The Coors Field Effect, Part I

Hello once again, kind-hearted, beautiful humans and Dodgers fans alike! It is I, The Beard, returning once again from my winter sabbatical, to welcome you to another baseball season! The sun peeks its head out over the eastern horizon, greeting the green grass, the birds singing their morning songs, and bears stumbling out of their caves to look for berries... and of course, the boys of summer preparing for their yearly endeavors. It is a special time of year.

As it happens, I am a bit early in arriving. Just a couple days ago, I was kicking it old school with some Beard colleagues in the Phelonx galaxy (which your Earth astronomers, possessing not even an echo of creativity, refer to as "JKCS041 galaxy cluster," a name which I admit has a certain flair but doesn't quite capture the feel of the place). After about six Phelonxian Xcharroobs (normally, three is plenty, but hey! I was on vacation) I happened to glance at the calendar out of the corner of one bleary eye. Phelonxians make a delicious beverage, but their calendars are nearly useless -- who really needs 178 months? -- and in my hazy state, I must sheepishly admit that I simply misread the thing. I ran home, packed a few things, and headed straight to Earth, just itching to see some spring baseball and frolicking horses and leprechauns polishing rainbows... and stepped right into a foot of snow. Sigh.

But I'm here now, and I'm extremely excited about this year's Rockies team. Two years ago, I concentrated on Ryan Spilborghs' greatness, and while he had a very good year, the Rockies ultimately disappointed me. I altered my approach last season, and focused on the team... Ryan was completely behind this decision, I assure you. As you recall, the team did very well, but Ryan did not have a very beardly season. This year, my challenge is to balance the two... and certainly, and extra month to prepare will come in handy, even if that month happens to be about 40 degrees below what I was enjoying just two days ago on the Beach of Xaxnar.

I will soon return with more thoughts on the 2010 Rockies season, which believe will prove to be a very special summer for us all. In the meantime, please sit back and enjoy the fruits of my winter labors: The Beard's three-part series on The Coors Field Effect.

Sincerely,
The Beard

THE COORS FIELD EFFECT
Exorcising the Ghost of This Long-Dead Legend.

The “Coors Field Effect” is the term used -- most often derisively -- to describe the unique qualities of playing baseball at Coors Field in Denver, Colorado, home of the Colorado Rockies. Many ballparks favor the hitter, but no ballpark demonstrated such a proclivity for offense as did Coors Field from 1995-2001, when its reputation as an extreme hitter's park was born. Despite evidence that the extreme effects of hitting at Coors Field have been largely minimized since the 2002 introduction of the "humidor," that reputation remains largely intact, and has had a profoundly negative effect on the reputation of Rockies hitters, who many fans and experts alike believe are not as talented as their accomplishments might suggest.

In this three-part series, The Year of the Beard will examine the Coors Field Effect. What causes it, and what comes from it? What can be (and has been) done to minimize the effect? Is the perception it creates about Rockies hitters a fair and accurate one? Is there evidence to suggest that the current methods used to adjust for a player's home park are unfair to Rockies hitters and pitchers? Are the best players in Rockies history – Larry Walker and Todd Helton – worthy of serious consideration for inclusion in the Baseball Hall of Fame?

PART ONE:

What Is It, and Why?
 

The short history of the Colorado Rockies is filled with players with amazing hitting statistics, often drastically higher than the marks they put up before they played in Colorado or after they left. During the first nine seasons of Rockies baseball (two at Mile High Stadium, and seven at Coors Field), the team was notorious for featuring journeymen having career years (Jeffrey Hammonds, Darryl Hamilton), making All-Stars out of merely decent hitters (Vinny Castilla, Dante Bichette), and helping great hitters put up stratospheric stats (Andres Gallaraga, Larry Walker) that raised many a suspicious eyebrow. At first, the cause for this was believed to hinge on one factor and one factor only: Denver’s high altitude making the ball travel farther. With that in mind, that's where we'll start.

From the onset of professional baseball in Denver, the high altitude has played a major role in how baseball is played there. In 1987, Joey Meyer of the Denver Zephyrs hit the longest measured home run in baseball history – a staggering 582 feet -- at Mile High Stadium.(1) At Denver's altitude of 5280 feet, air molecules are not as closely spaced as they are at sea level. This is commonly referred to as Denver’s “thin” air. Assuming baseballs struck with equal force, with less air to resist the movement of the ball as it flies through the air, the ball struck in Denver goes farther than does the ball struck at a lower elevation.

A ball hit at Coors Field will therefore travel anywhere from 5-9% farther than it will at any other MLB park (the 2^nd highest altitude for a Major League city is Atlanta, at about 1000 feet). So when Coors Field was seeing home run records fall seemingly every year and Rockies players with batting averages well over .350, the common explanation was that the thin air was to blame.

This was partially true, and it still is. The ball travels farther in Denver, and there's no getting around it. However, it can be argued that despite the fact that "thin air" is, to this day, the most widely given explanation for the Rockies' inflated offensive numbers, Denver's thin air effects on the travel of a batted ball are, in actuality, probably the least important factor in the entire Coors Field Effect equation.

Another crucial part which Denver’s thin air plays during a baseball game is the effect it has on pitching. For the same reasons that a batted ball travels farther at Coors Field, breaking pitches break far less (some reports suggest as much as 25-30% less) at high altitude. Curveballs and sliders depend on the spin of the ball to create air flow across the seams, which causes the ball to break, or “curve,” as it approaches the plate.

Just as with a batted ball, the less-densely packed air molecules offer less resistance to the ball’s movement, and the ball does not move as much as the pitcher intended. The result is that breaking pitches are “flattened out,” making them far easier to hit. There is no better example of this than the two seasons spent in Colorado by the late Darryl Kile, a pitcher who relied heavily on his superior curveball, but found that it was ineffective at high altitudes… not only because it went farther when it was hit, but because it was much easier to hit in the first place.

Despite the fact that the physics involved are exactly the same, the effect of Denver's thin air on hitting is known to baseball fans everywhere, but its effects on pitching are, for some reason, largely under-reported and misunderstood, even to this day. Even the Rockies front office was slow to realize the extent of this problem... more than ten years went by, and hundreds of millions were spent bringing big-name pitchers such as Kile, Billy Swift, Bret Saberhagen, Mike Hampton, and Denny Neagle to Colorado, before the Rockies began to understand the pattern. Only once the organization began to avoid pitchers who threw a lot of breaking balls, and to focus instead on power pitchers who throw heavy sinkers and off-speed stuff (pitches that depend less on the the spin of the ball) did the team's pitching staff begin to find consistent success.

A third factor to the Coors Field Effect is the park itself. Even before the first game was played at Coors Field, adjustments were being made for the altitude. The designers of Coors Field knew that the ball would travel farther, and so in order to cut down on home runs, they made the outfield dimensions some of the deepest in baseball. This did not help – even with the deep fences, many moon shots that would have been loud outs in other parks were winding up in the third row of seats at Coors. The park became synonymous with the home run… in 1995, the park’s first year, Coors Field was on a pace which would have easily surpassed the then-34 year old record for home runs in one park during a single season, had the 1995 season not been shortened by 18 games due to the strike. Coors Field set the home run record the following year, then upped the record again in 1999.

In addition to being extremely home-run friendly, Coors Field’s expansive power alleys made for lots of extra-base hits, and the fact that outfielders expected the ball to carry caused them to play deeper than they normally might, allowing for plenty of bloop singles as well. Basically, because of its dimensions, Coors Field at any altitude would be a strong hitter’s park… not necessarily for home runs, but definitely for average, extra base hits, and runs scored.

The thin air of Denver made it difficult to pitch, easy to hit, and the ballpark itself lent itself to high-scoring baseball. These factors made Coors Field from 1995-2001 -- an era when unnaturally-enhanced players were already obliterating offensive records at every turn -- the most prolific offensive ballpark in major league history. It was the perfect storm, and Coors Field’s reputation as an offensive powderkeg was perhaps forever entrenched in the minds of baseball's fans. 

The Coors Field Effect was real, and for all the excitement it created during a game, its overall effect on the team and its players was a decidedly negative one. Rockies fans and management alike feared that the difficulties of pitching in Denver would prevent the team from ever being truly competitive, as teams designed to take advantage of their home environment proved, season after season, to be woefully inadequate away from Denver. The accomplishments of Rockies hitters were consistently overlooked (Walker's 1997 MVP the only exception), never more outrageously than Todd Helton's 2000 season: Helton flirted with .400, missed a Triple Crown by eight homers, and led the league in nearly every hitting category, all while playing his customarily excellent defense -- and finished 5th for the MVP. Pundits around the country wrote off baseball in Denver as a joke, some even calling for the team to relocate to a location more suitable for "real" baseball. 

The $175 million disaster that was the Neagle and Hampton signings proved that if the Rockies were to ever field a competitive team, a solution to the Coors Field Effect was needed... but what could be done? Radical, often ridiculous changes to the park were suggested: making the outfield fence one big, 35-foot-tall "Green Monster;" raising the pitcher's mound to give pitchers an edge; putting a dome over the stadium and forcing air down towards the field of play. Others suggested  the novel ideal of having two different pitching rotations: one for home and one for the road.

In the end, the solution ended up being, as it often is, right in front of them. The solution lay not in the park or the players, but in the smallest thing of all... the five ounces of cork, yarn, and leather that are not just the focus of the game, but in which is contained the game itself, from start to finish: the ball.

Next: The Humidor to the Rescue!

(1): While there are shots by Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle (among others) reputed to have traveled over 600 feet, Meyer's home run remains the longest home run to have been retrieved and measured from where it actually landed, rather than from where it eventually rolled. Like the red seat at Fenway which marks Ted Williams' longest home run there (502 feet), the seat where Meyer's shot landed was painted orange, and easily visible among the section of blue ones. I remember sitting at MIle High Stadium for a football game and marvelling at that single orange seat in the distance, right near the end of the horseshoe, and then realizing that in baseball configuration, those stands would have been moved back another 150 feet east.