San Francisco Giants: How Badly Does AT&T Park Suppress Barreled Balls?

San Francisco Giants fans now how bad AT&T Park is for hitters, but what about when a hitter hits a ball right on the nose?

It’s long been known that AT&T Park is a bad place for hitters to call home. The huge dimensions and breeze that comes in from McCovey Cove make for friendly conditions for pitchers, but the San Francisco Giants’ offense has routinely suffered as a result.

MLB Park Factors are a good indicator of how an offense is suppressed in a particular park. Over the last seven seasons, AT&T Park has been ranked among the top-five worst parks for hitters five times, and have been dead last twice. That all makes sense, with San Francisco’s home park being the place that home runs go to die on the warning track.

But let’s investigate a different way that AT&T Park keeps good hitters down. San Francisco is the absolute worst park in baseball for turning a barreled ball into a home run.

A barreled ball is defined by Statcast as a ball “whose comparable hit types (in terms of exit velocity and launch angle) have led to a minimum .500 batting average and 1.500 slugging percentage since Statcast was implemented Major League wide in 2015”. A ball needs an exit velocity of at least 98 miles per hour with the proper launch angle (25 to 31 degrees, at that velocity) to be classified as a “barrel”. As exit velocity increases, the range of launch angles does as well.

In the simplest terms, it’s a ball that a hitter catches right on the screws, right on the nose, right on the button, or whatever other saying there is. He really couldn’t hit a ball much better than that. As broadcaster Mike Krukow would say, “he roasted that nut”.

In the three seasons worth of Statcast information, a barreled ball (henceforth referred to simply as a “barrel”) results in a hit 80.7 percent of the time across the league. In AT&T Park, that numbers drops pretty drastically to 73.4 percent of the time, which (surprisingly enough) isn’t actually the worst mark in the baseball. In Detroit’s Comerica Park, a barrel results in a hit only 70.3 percent of the time, the only mark worse than AT&T’s.

More from Golden Gate Sports

Home runs are the category in which AT&T Park really holds hitter back. In the average park, a barrel ends up as a home run 58.9 percent of the time, and 73 percent of barrel hits are home runs. In San Francisco, only 42 percent of barrels end up as home runs, and 57.2 percent of hits on barrels leave the yard. Both numbers are the lowers of any park over the last three years, and about five percentage points worse than the next-lowest stadium in each category.

AT&T Park doesn’t actually suppress a hitter’s ability to barrel a ball, as there are eight ballparks that have seen fewer barrels than AT&T’s 700 over the past three seasons. That includes some more hitter-friendly yards like Great American Ball Park in Cincinnati and Guaranteed Rate Field in Chicago, and parks that host high-powered offenses like Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles.. Instead, it keeps those balls in the ballpark much, much more often than any other ballpark.

Compare AT&T Park’s home run percentage to that of Great American Ball Park, the easiest park to hit a barrel for a home run. 69.6 percent of barrels go for home runs in the Cincinnati bandbox, over 27 percent higher than in San Francisco.

AT&T Park isn’t just killer on Giants’ hitters, either, so there’s not much room to blame the team’s lackluster lineup in recent seasons for this low standing. When opposing hitters earn themselves a barrel at AT&T Park, it results in a home run 42.6 percent of the time, which is slightly higher than Giants’ hitters, who come in at 40.2 percent, but still a depressingly low number. That makes up AT&T Park’s total of 42 percent.

Giant hitter performances away from AT&T Park suggest that a large chunk of the problem lies in the park as well. On the road, a barrel from a Giant leaves the yard 54.5 percent of the time, over 14 points higher than their home number. If that number were placed on the overall list of ballparks’ home run percentage on barrels, it would rank 24th. That ranking still isn’t all too pleasant, but it sure beats finishing dead last by a mile.

Of course, all this proves that AT&T Park is bad on hitters no matter who they are, but we also know that left-handed hitters have a much harder time. With Triple’s Alley taking up so much real estate and McCovey Cove blowing the wind in, left-handed power is suppressed a lot worse than their right-handed counterparts.

A lefty that barrels a ball in AT&T Park hits a home run only 36.7 percent of the time, compared to 46 percent for a righty. That’s nearly a 10-percent difference and it gives a clear reason as to why the Giants have worked so diligently to add right-handed hitters to their lineup. Guys like Andrew McCutchen, Evan Longoria, and Austin Jackson will suffer in the power department because of the park dimensions, but not nearly as much as a left-handed hitter that would have been brought in.

However, it’s not all bad for lefties. Though they aren’t rewarded with longballs as much as the guys on the other side of the plate, they still benefit from the presence of Triple’s Alley. Barrels from a lefty result in a hit 75.6 percent of the time at AT&T Park, compared to 71.1 percent for righties.

Let’s look at a real-life example of a hitter getting A&T’d. On April 9th, 2016, the second season of Statcast’s league-wide usage of barrels, Brandon Belt hit a ball with an exit velocity of 102.1 miles per hour and launch angle of 32.8 degrees, which traveled 393 feet. That all mashed together to give Belt a barrel.

That combination of exit velocity (102-103 mph), launch angle (32-33 degrees), and distance (at least 390 feet) results in a home run 81.5 percent of the time, like it did for Alex Gordon on April 20th, 2016 at Kauffman Stadium, or for Chris Coghlan on July 28th, 2016 at Coors Field. Or even for Belt himself on June 30th, 2017 at PNC Park in Pittsburgh. On April 9th two years ago, that combo resulted in nothing more than a long out in right-center field for Belt. That’s the epitome of getting “AT&T’d”.

That’s the danger of playing at a park like AT&T. The park conditions make it so that, even when a hitter catches one just about as well as he can, a home run is going to occur well under half the time.

Next: Former Giants in Camps Around the League

This is not good news for Giants’ hitters, but let’s remember, Giants’ pitchers are benefitting from this as well. For every disappointed San Francisco hitter that watched a ball get caught at the track, there’s one on the other side with a frown on his face as well.

Home/San Francisco Giants