It is really touching how much my puppy loves my slippers.  I don’t let him chew on my slippers, of course, and actually he has outgrown that stage when he chews on shoelaces and strings and cords and, if you don’t stop him, electrical cords.   He still grabs my shoes and starts to work on them any time he can get into my room when I am not there. 

            Actually, it has been remarkably easy to teach him not to do most of these things.  You just tell him "No" in an emphatic manner, and he understands what he is being told not to do, and he very much wants to be a good puppy, so he goes along with the program as much as he is able to.   But he does SO love those slippers.  I put them in places where he doesn’t get into stuff, but he does get them.  Occasionally I go into his room, where he sleeps at night, and find he has snuck in there with one or both of my slippers.  I notice that he has disappeared, and he comes running back with a big innocent look on his face, confident that I would never notice my slipper missing before bedtime. 

            He spends a lot of quality time with my slipper, and he knows he is not supposed to chew on it, so he just nibbles very gently on little parts of it that stick out and beg to be chewed on.  When I catch him doing this he quickly stops chewing and starts licking the slipper affectionately, as if it was my face; see, Daddy, I’m not doing anything; I’m just licking it a little bit.  Sometimes he sticks his nose into the opening of the slipper and just rests it there. Sometimes when he takes a nap he rests his head over it, like a pillow, and when he has a good rawhide bone to chew on he props it up over the opening of the slipper and chews fervently on the bone, but in direct contact with his slipper.  He hasn’t really damaged it in the last month, I don’t think, and I no longer have the heart to take it away from him.   Except when I actually want to wear it. 

Bombs Away

         So now we come to Home Runs.  Unlike the other things we have studied here, Home Runs allowed have to be park-adjusted before they can be evaluated.   You don’t have to park-adjust Walks and Strikeouts; I mean, you could, I guess.  There is SOME park effect on strikeouts, because some parks have poor visibility, and there is some variability in Wild Pitches based on the distance from the catcher to the screen behind him; short screen, the runners don’t have as much time to advance.  These effects are small enough that we can ignore them.  You can’t ignore park effects on Home Runs. 

            The #1 team in the data, in terms of NOT allowing home runs, is one that you would never guess.  There are 2,550 teams in the data, so I’ll give you 2,549 guesses.  None of you would get it.

            It’s the 1920 Philadelphia Phillies.  The 1920 Phillies weren’t a good team—they were 62-91—but they allowed only 5 home runs all year on the road.   In their home park they hit 50 home runs and allowed 30.  On the road, they hit 14 homers and allowed 5. 

            The old Baker Bowl was the Coors Field of its day, a place where home run balls went to play with their friends.  Since there were 80 home runs in their home games and only 19 in their road games, their Park Home Run Factor for the season is over 400 (416).   The Phillies allowed just 35 home runs (30 and 5), while the league average was 33, so they were almost average in home runs allowed despite pitching in a park with a one-season Home Run Factor over 400! 

            Adjusting their Home Runs Allowed (35) by the Park Home Run Adjustment (2.35), we treat them as if they allowed 14.87 Home Runs.   Since their pitchers faced 5,906 batters, that is .00252 home runs per batter, or one home run for every 400 hitters.  The era norm was .01038 and the standard deviation was .00284, so they were 2.8 Standard Deviations above the norm in terms of not allowing home runs.  We mark that as 128, which is a normal best-ever ratio—2.8 standard deviations better than the norm.   These are the Top 10:

            I believe that all of those teams except the 1976 Giants played in home run hitter’s ballparks, parks with a Home Run Index greater than 100.  The Giants’ was 99.   You can see why this would be true.  If you play in an extreme Home Run Park, then you just HAVE to get pitchers who don’t allow home runs—whereas, if you play in a big park that doesn’t allow home runs, then you don’t pay that much attention to it, so you wind up allowing a bunch of home runs in your road games.  When the park effect is filtered out, the teams which worried about it wind up ahead, and the teams which didn’t worry about it wind up behind (in that area.  Hopefully they compensated somewhere else.)   These are the teams which had the worst home run numbers. 

            The team with the worst Home Runs Allowed Rate, relative to the era, was 3.8 standard deviations below the norm. 

            I believe that all ten of those teams played in parks with low home run factors—thus, teams that were not so much inclined to worry about how many long flies they saw screaming back over their hurler’s heads.   When you get away from the ends of the chart, the top and the bottom, then the park effects mix up pretty quickly; they’re just really obvious at the top and bottom of the chart.

            The 1920 Phillies number is of course somewhat flukish.  It is flukish for two reasons.  First, the very low number of home runs in that era creates quite extreme park home run factors, which do slightly eccentric things to the data.  Second, the 1920 National League season is not truly representative of the decade.  It’s an outlier.   There were only 261 home runs in the NL in 1920.  For most of the decade, the numbers were two to three times that high.  The 1920 Phillies’ number is more a deception than a truth.

            But if you’re worrying about that throwing off my eventual conclusions, I wouldn’t worry about it.  All I am doing here is trying to map the bottom of the charts.  The method that I will used to measure the advantages and disadvantages of each pitching staff will be completely different. 

            Anyway. . . . the overall advantage of not allowing home runs is less in the won-lost log than I would have guessed it to be.  The top 510 teams in the data, in terms of not allowing home runs, allowed an average of 634 runs, and had an average won-lost record of 81-75:

            There is 126 runs a year difference between the high-home-runs-allowed teams and the low-home-runs-allowed teams—about one run a game, or a little less.   This is a little bit LESS than the parallel difference for strikeouts or walks.   And here is this chart that I always give you that gives you the average Home Runs per batters faced in each decade, and the standard deviations:

            Be well.  Price of gas is lower than it has been in years, but nobody has any place to go.