Cardinals Minor League Park Factors

Minor league games have begun, which means we're back to scanning DFRs to check on our favorite prospects. Before we get too excited though, we should familiarize ourselves with the scoring environments that each of the Cardinals' minor league affiliates play in and the effects of the stadiums they call home. Properly understanding the context in which these players exist will allow for better performance evaluation.

Matt Eddy from Baseball America explains why park factors are important to consider:

Depending on the park's features, a team may gain an advantage from righthanded power hitters taking aim at a short left-field porch, speedy outfielders covering a vast territory, or groundball pitchers paired with a slow playing surface limiting the number of hits.

There have been a glut of posts about minor league park factors lately. Here's one for the Twins. Here's one for the Mets. Red Sox. Angels. Hey, we should have our own! I thought it would be helpful to generate a reference for us to have throughout the season in case we forget whether or not a middle-infielder's power surge at double-A should get us all hot and bothered, even if we always have Daniel Descalso's 2009 season for that reminder.

If you're new to this whole prospect thing, by the way, you should really check out the prospect primer still available at our old site. It was written by azruavatar and makes for an informative crash course on prospect evaluation. Click that link and you'll notice that he already had some park factors listed on that page, but I thought this topic was worth revisiting since those factors were from Dan Szymborski back in 2007 and both MiLB.com and Baseball America have published articles on park factors this offseason, each with data sets extending back through 2010. Also, the Cardinals have two new minor league affiliations this season (Peoria Chiefs and State College Spikes), so we have two new stadiums to consider.

What follows are several tables for your reference throughout the season. I've pulled information available for free at four different websites. I've already mentioned Baseball America and MiLB.com but Statcorner and Minor League Central also offer some unique information. Impressed by a fast start or discouraged by a slow one? Hold that opinion and come here first to see if the context of that player's environment helps explain their success/failure.

Park & League Factors (Baseball America)

Interpreting the tables above and below is very similar to the first two even though the numbers look a little different. Instead of 1.00, league average is scaled to 100, but the same idea remains. Anything over 100 is above league average while anything under 100 is below league average.

I really like the park factors available at Statcorner because they account for batter handedness. The first number in each column represents left-handed hitters while the second number represents right-handed hitters. This table (as well as the one above it) should help explain why batsmen enjoy making the jump from Palm beach to Springfield. Another quirk worth mentioning is that State College apparently allows left-handed hitters to hit home runs at a rate that is nine percent above league average while right handed hitters clear the fence twenty-six percent below league average.

Rookie League Park Factors (Minor League Central)

You might have noticed that the Cardinal's rookie league affiliates have been missing from this conversation. Thankfully, there's Minor League Central, though it's unclear how much weight these factors should be given considering they are conspicuously absent from the other websites. Being that rookie level teams only play half a season of games per year, and this data from Minor League Central is from the 2012 season only, I'd recommend taking it with a grain of salt. I mean, just look at that HR column for the GCL Cardinals. That seems unsustainable even for the wildest of ball parks.