Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1106: The Sortable Ballpark Leaderboard

Episode Date: September 6, 2017

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about their Hurricane Harvey relief raffle’s status, hot and cold teams, Trevor Bauer’s run-in with Avisail Garcia, and evolving pitch-selection in the major leagues, then talk to EW listener Max Schleicher about his fan-sentiment-based study on the best and worst big-league ballparks (and big-league-ballpark amenities). Audio intro: Mos Def, "Pretty […]

Hey, everyone. Just so you know, we recorded this episode when Apple Watches were still far from our minds. If you'd like our takes on ridiculous Red Sox Yankees, rule-breaking, sign-stealing him out the park Pitch quiet, fire sniper, not the one you tryna box with Block work when the block turn jawless And triple beams ain't the best means to wear your options Smarts, get smart with your smartness Too busy surviving to argue about Darwin, darling Hello and welcome to episode 1106 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters.

I'm Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, and in Oregon where ash is falling outside his window, it's Jeff Sullivan of Fangraphs. Hello. Hello. It's sad. Yeah. Normally, some types of ash, I guess, would interest you if they were the result of a volcanic explosion of some sort. But that is not the kind of ash that is falling right now. Yes, we have forest fires. We have fires all over the state. And now, granted, the majority of them are older and the majority of them started by lightning.

But there is one particular fire that is new, started over the weekend in a very, very popular and beautiful and scenic and predicted area as the columbia river gorge there is a fire started by some irresponsible teenager playing with fireworks and the fire has spread i think it spread 12 miles overnight which i don't know much about fires and so now i know how one fire has moved i will now wait to collect data on how hundreds of other fires move to see if 12 is a lot but it feels like 12 is a lot and the winds are blowing from east to west and so ash from the fire is currently falling like a light dusting of snow in oregon where it is also 100 degrees and bone dry so conditions are bad going to get worse and one of the most beautiful parts of the country is actively being destroyed because teenagers can't help themselves but play with things that blow up and i know it's not their fault because we've all done it, but also it is their fault. And I hope they get to

get to go to teenager jail. Well, to segue from that into another natural disaster related topic, I guess that's not totally a natural disaster, but partially, we are still running our raffle for Houston Hurricane Harvey relief, and the response has been great. I am blown away by how generous everyone out of it and support Effectively Wild and all of that. But it still is kind of overwhelming to see all of these emails come in just almost on the hour or even more often. My inbox is pinging and it's another person donating to the Hurricane Harvey Relief Fund. If you are interested, I'm going to keep this open through, let's say, Friday morning. Maybe I'll do the drawing at the end of the week, Friday afternoon. So if you are still interested in getting in on this, you can donate to the Hurricane Harvey Relief Fund at ghcf.org slash hurricane hyphen relief, and you will be entered into a random drawing for an autographed microphone that no longer works, but was used for many episodes of Effectively Wild and an autographed book and a t-shirt and Russell Carlton's upcoming book as well. And just send your receipt, forward it, take a screenshot, whatever to

podcast at fangraphs.com and you will be entered into that drawing. Every increment of $10 gets you an entry into that drawing. So thanks to everyone who has responded. It would be amazing if we could get to 10,000 and that is still a possibility, I think. So if you're wanting to get into it, but dragging your feet, you still got a couple of days and thanks to everyone again. So we have a guest later on in this episode. It's Max Schleicher. He is an Effectively Wild listener, a Facebook group member, and he has made an incredibly informative and stat-heavy post about ballparks, which ones are good, which ones are bad, what they're good and bad at. This is using fan sentiment analysis of fan reviews of these ballparks is fascinating we will talk to him just a little bit later any current events baseball stuff you want to touch on well let's see just in regular baseball stuff the uh over the past 10 games so you know you look at the standings there's the

l10 category over the past 10 games the los angeles dodgers are one into nine the arizona diamondbacks are 10 to no the diamondbacks have gained nine games on the dodgers in the past week and a half and so now they're only 12 and a half games behind the dodgers so even the dodgers are in this horrible slump and they will not actually reach 116 wins because that's just not going to happen they still despite everything they're still eight games clear of the next best team in major league baseball so i guess there was the recent sports illustrated cover that what was it best team ever or something about the dodgers seems like you probably shouldn't write the best team ever

headline just kind of in general or at least wait until things are done like last year's cubs wait to write about them as one of the best teams ever until the season is over but in any case dodgers slumping slash still great slash still best team in baseball by an easy margin dama backs can't lose. Indians can't lose. I guess that's what's going on. Teams pulling away in their divisions except for the American League East. And I guess related to the Indians, partial soft segue here. There is a little incident between Trevor Bauer, who is somewhat rootable, I guess,

and Abisail Garcia, who is a little Miggy, right? One of the one of the little Miggies. So who was a little Miggy, right? One of the countless little Miggys. So there's a little showdown. We know Bauer's got something of a, let's say, competitive streak in him. And Garcia has his own sort of, I don't know. Garcia kind of would do that. He takes a swing, misses a pitch, and then kind of like nods his head kind of deal, which Miguel Cabrera also does.

I wonder if that's where the little Miggy comes from, or maybe he's just kind of picked up the trait. In any case, it was Monday, I believe, Labor believe liberty indians playing game against the white socks and trevor bauer was facing garcia and on the first pitch of the at bat bauer hung a slider and garcia fouled it off and kind of like nodded and looked out of the mound thinking seeming to convey like all right all right i'm on it i got you even though if you're a hitter you just missed hung first pitch slider you fouled it off you got nobody anyway bauer comes back he sees that and he thinks okay okay we're doing this he throws a second pitch breaking ball and garcia fouls it off again

nods again like i got you even though now we have twice the amount of evidence that no you don't have him and so bauer comes back with a third pitch curveball garcia swings and misses bauer points to the dugout to uh show garcia where to go and bauer's words he says uh quote he swung and missed i decided to remind him of the rules of the game three strikes you're out go sit back in the dugout to his credit he took it like a champ he put his head down he shut his mouth and he walked himself back to the dugout good for him so i don't know what is interesting about this aside from boys will be boys and men are kind of stupid, but also competitiveness is fun. But what I liked about this is as Bauer, Bauer has a sort of viral or little interview quote that

was passed around all the different aggregators and Twitter and whatnot. His quote began, quote, he likes to run his mouth. This is Bauer referring to Garcia. He likes to run his mouth. You start sitting there talking, oh, they don't throw me fastballs why do they just throw me breaking balls he said it before not sure he knows that the rules of the game say you can throw whatever pitch you want i wonder how many people go up there like there's a general baseball trend that we're seeing now and it's maybe led maybe the yankees are on the vanguard of this but a trend away from fastballs because it is maybe the oldest baseball coaching technique or i don't know oldest baseball instruction is just throw fastballs work off your

fastball everything for your fastball and then now more than ever we have pitchers are just like no because they want fastballs why would we give in and it's true why would you give in bauer in particular he's you know say whatever you want to say about Trevor Bauer, but he is forward thinking. He's open minded in some ways. And he is certainly open minded in terms of fastball avoidance. He's been working toward that end for a while. And if you have hitters who are just going up there thinking like, he's going to throw me a fastball. Why wouldn't he throw me a fastball? Come on, man up, throw me a fastball. Why would you throw a fastball? Why would you ever throw a fastball? So in conclusion, there are still too many fastballs thrown in baseball. That's my conclusion. Too many fastballs. Don't let hitters see fastballs. Work backwards. Just turn everything upside down. Fastball revolution, anti-fastball revolution. I want to see it. I want to see it take off. Yeah, I'm confused about the state of that because there was some notice paid to that earlier in the year. Tom Berducci wrote about it in SI. I've had him on the Ringer podcast to talk about it.

And there have been like what the Yankees don't throw fastballs very much. So there's been attention to that or the Astros throw lots of sliders and breaking balls. But on the whole, I feel like it has maybe even swung back. like it has maybe even swung back. I think Rob Arthur wrote something at FiveThirtyEight not long ago about whether and how pitchers are adapting to the home run spike. And I think he noted in there that the fastball rate, which had declined, was suddenly on the upswing again, possibly because pitchers are trying to use it to avoid home runs in some way. If you look at the league-wide stats on the fan graphs, it doesn't seem as if there's been any decrease at all, really, in league-wide four-seam fastball percentage at the very least. as well. And that is very slightly down from 37.2 last season, but is higher than every previous season for which we have data before that, I think. So I don't know whether this is a thing

that is actually happening on a league-wide basis. I guess 2007 and 8, it was higher. 2007, 8, 9, and maybe the data wasn't quite as great in those early years as it is now. But definitely relative to like the last several seasons, this season's fastball rate doesn't seem notable. So I can't tell whether this is a thing that is certainly happening in certain pitchers cases and certain teams cases, but maybe we're overgeneralizing to say that it's happening on a league wide basis. I can't really tell. Based on this, it doesn't seem as if it's that huge a trend. Yeah, right. It should be happening on a league-wide basis, probably. But if you look at the data, you've got four-seam fastball rate is

up about two percentage points from its recent low. But its sinkers, which teams are, or at least the league overall, seems to be avoiding more. Sinker rate is down yeah but about four and a half percentage points from its peak in 2012 so this would be reflective of teams trying to pitch less often down in the zone because that is where hitters have been targeting because pitches have always been taught to work low so as hitters adapt to that and try to elevate the low pitch then pitchers will think okay well then i'm going to do something else and so i think that you've seen less and less conversation about the utility of having a sinker and you see more and more conversation about pitchers who are trying to throw four seam fastballs and work on the edges or work up because hitters are so good at hitting the low pitch there are still of course pitchers like dallas keitel or other sinker ballers but it's

become increasingly difficult to make that work and so you have a lot of these these four seamers that are starting to show up we've got chad Green throwing a wicked four-seamer all of a sudden. I don't know where that came from, but he's got it, and he's throwing it a lot. So it's a difference in fastball ratios, I guess, if, of course, these numbers can be trusted. And thanks to this conversation, here is a very easy Fangraphs post for me to write sometime in the near-term future. Yeah, and I guess curveball rate is at its highest,

although it's also tied with 2012. So I don't know if that's all that meaningful. But look at the sliders. That's where you see a peak. Yeah, and as for Trevor Bauer, it's funny how the perception of him has changed. I don't know the general perception of him, but initially he was embraced by stat head types

because it seemed like he had his unique throwing program and he was willing to experiment and do things differently and we always like that by default but then turned out that he's not really that good he's just kind of uh you know he's he's all right but he's not really improving and sometimes it seems as if maybe he's experimenting too much. I don't know whether that's fair or unfair, but his results haven't really improved. He's not better than a mid-rotation starter, certainly.

And between that and some of his Twitter comments, which did not endear him to people, he is now kind of, I think, someone people are probably tired of more than anything. So I don't know whether people are inclined to take Trevor Bauer's side in any kind of confrontation these days. his performance specific credit, his strikeout rate is up substantially this year relative to last year and the rest of his career. So there are signs that he is improving his ERA still not very good, but his peripherals have gotten better. So Trevor Bauer person people are tired of, but still improving as a pitcher. So you know, as these things work, public opinion will probably shift again, if he demonstrates that he is a good pitcher, then people will put up with his what

some people might consider to be nonsense and what the scientific consensus would agree is nonsense but the people will still support an athlete who is good until he ceases being good so while trevor bauer is having a pretty good second half i think indians fans are kind of on board and then it based on bauer's history probably won't be that long until they are back off board all right is that it should we get to our guest yeah that's that's plenty we'll talk again tomorrow. That's fine for now. We do talk a lot. All right. We'll be right back with Max.

I wasn't cut out for the bigs. Guess I've been a fool. And middle school was just a bit of cruel ridicule. But when you step into the ranks of the man, it's like they push you from the high dive to the kiddie pool. Thanks. It's time to ballroom waltz that plank. We're little minnows in a small shark tank.

You try to swim without getting blood in the water, but you're all hurt and gust like a ballpark, Frank. All right. So we are joined today by Max Schleicher. He is a digital marketing manager at Review Trackers, which is a company that helps companies monitor and manage and analyze their online reviews, figure out what they're not doing well at, what they could do better at. More importantly, at least to me, maybe not to him, he is an Effectively Wild listener and Facebook group member. And he made a post some time ago in the Facebook group that grew into this really excellent and informative article on the Review Trackers website, which we will link to.

But it is called Ranking MLB Stadiums by Fan Sentiment, and it's based on 130,000 baseball stadium reviews by actual people who have been to baseball stadiums. Max, hello. Hi, guys. How are you doing? We're doing well. So can you explain the methodology here? Because this hits a very long and thorough article, and it's clear that a lot of work went into this more than you expected, I am sure. So can you describe how you arrived at these rankings? Sure. So it's a kind of data that probably a lot of people aren't

necessarily familiar with. What I did for the methodology of this is basically collected all of these stadium reviews. So as you mentioned, 130,000 different stadium reviews. And then my company has an algorithm that reads text and then analyzes that text for keywords. And then it gives a score for each of those keywords. So it reads a review that says, hey, the nachos were great at Cisnes Bank Ballpark. And then it says, ah, this person liked the nachos. It extracts that keyword and gives it a score. So I could take this algorithm and apply it to 130,000 baseball stadium reviews. And suddenly I take all those text reviews and convert them into data where all of those reviews have scores for individual

elements that are featured in that review. So the nachos, the seats, et cetera. So basically it takes 130,000 baseball stadium reviews and turns it into something like 550,000 different keywords with scores about different parts of the baseball stadium experience. So I took all that and then figured out different kind of categories for how people talk about stadiums. So I put some of these keywords into food and drink, like nachos or hot dogs, et cetera, and other keywords into different parts of different topics like family friendliness or the facility and all that kind of stuff and use that as a way to rank stadiums, but then also as a way just to kind of find different outliers and insights about different particular stadiums and what they do strangely or much better or much worse than other stadiums.

And so would these reviews have been posted on like Yelp or some sites like that? Exactly. It's all public data. So it's like Facebook and Google reviews, all that kind of stuff. And I would imagine that if someone writes the nachos were really great, not, And I would imagine that if someone writes the nachos were really great, not maybe that would kind of confuse an algorithm a little bit, but probably occasional things there where it could kind of trip up a software. But on the whole, there's probably a pretty decent correlation between positive comments and positively classified comments? Yeah, definitely. All of the for me to poop on kind of things or psychs, those probably tripped at the algorithm. But I'm banking on the fact that that's not a statistically significant group of these reviews. I think many of the not reviews would be clustered around the year 2006. Was it Bill James who had the line that if the statistic fully matches the eye test, it's not really useful and if it completely counters the eye test, then it's probably lying to you. But if you have a few outliers, then you might have something there. And I've butchered whatever the actual phrasing of the statement was.

But for the most part, just kind of eyeballing the reviews, a lot of it kind of comports to what you would expect. You see the better stadiums in your head. There's sort of toward the left, the better reviews and the worst ones to the right. The extreme ones aren't really surprising, but was there anything in particular that stood out to you that you didn't expect? Like, were there specific stadiums that either did way better or way worse than you expected going into this? Because I'm sure you already had some preconceived notions about what these numbers would look like. Totally. I'm glad you butchered the Bill James quote so I didn't have to. But yeah, that really jives with my experience. So

as you mentioned, like the ones, they're ones that are just as to be expected. Everyone raves about Camden Yards or PNC Park and those two really, really well. But the two big outliers were Wrigley Field and Fenway Park and to a lesser extent, like Yankee Stadium and Dodger Stadium. Some of these stadiums that, you know, if you were to ask the sort of fan on the street to say like, hey, what are some iconic baseball stadiums or that kind of thing, they would jump to the top of the list. These stadiums had, or I should take a step back and just focus on only Wrigley and Fenway, but those two stadiums, Wrigley and Fenway, had kind of an interesting situation where they're the only two stadiums that scored above average

in terms of their global ranking. So when people give a star rating in an actual review, they rate Wrigley Field and Fenway Park above average. But the sentiment in the actual reviews themselves is below average compared to the rest of stadiums. So in other words, people are saying something like, or I'll actually just pull up an actual quote here, where someone goes to Fenway Park and they say, oh, Fenway, five stars. Man, the bathrooms are terrible. Beer is really expensive. I couldn't see anything. My seat was facing the wrong way, but I had a great time and I would love to come back.

And so like you see this sort of like number of negative moments in every review is like is suggested. It's kind of like a stadium like Marlins Park, but the overall global ranking is much higher than you would expect. So it's a really interesting phenomenon. the overall global ranking is much higher than you would expect. So it's a really interesting phenomenon. I just kind of want a fun part about doing something like this is that you can always go and for each one of these data points, you can just actually go and read all of the reviews. So some of that's kind of confirmation bias, but you can go back and say, well, people are saying this, what are they actually saying? And so I read a lot of funny reviews of people talking about things like that, where I remember one couple had like driven six hours to go to Wrigley.

The game was rained out and they just went to go see a statue of Ryan Sandberg. And this statue was closed due to some like construction situation and they couldn't do anything that they wanted to do. But they said it was like the best time of their life. So it's kind of like charmingly human, too, I think, for all these people who just are having great times at these stadiums, despite all the struggles. Yeah, so that makes sense that you'd have the oldest stadiums high in that kind of intangibles area, right? Like a historical ambiance at Fenway and Wrigley. Maybe you have lifelong attachments to those places, etc. And so, yeah, they're more than the sum of their parts.

So that's interesting. That's what you would expect to see, I guess. So was there anything that stood out, I guess, in the food area? I guess just most popular ballpark foods overall and places that excelled or trailed in any specific kind of food? Sure. One kind of cool thing you can do with the state is you can compare stadium by stadium, but then you can also just compare like in general, how do nachos compare to hot dogs or something like that?

So one of the most interesting findings I thought was it was just comparing the different menu items across all stadiums. And so summing up every time someone mentions a hot dog, regardless of what stadium it is and comparing that to another menu item. And one of the cool things you see is that hot dog scores super, super mediocrely, if that is the right way to say that. I think that the average hot dog score is just barely positive. And so it's actually one of the lower menu score items. So basically, everyone's going to a baseball stadium, getting a hot dog and kind of like being, oh, that was okay, but not really worth it. Replacement level hot dogs, I guess. Exactly. Tons of replacement level hot dogs. But other menu items score much,

much higher. So barbecue and burgers are like four times higher than a hot dog in terms of average sentiment. And so that's super interesting to me because hot dogs are by far and away the most popular mentioned item for a food item. I think they get six times more mentions than any other menu item. So people are basically going to baseball stadiums thinking they've got to get a hot dog, getting a hot dog, not being very satisfied with it. So what this suggests to me is that, hey, if you go to a baseball stadium, even though you think you should get a hot dog, probably if you get something else, you're going to enjoy it much, much more. One of the things that stands out to me, at least from this data is you there are a lot of new ballparks in baseball, at least to me, maybe I'm getting old, but a lot of the ballparks feel like they're pretty new. And the newest of all the ballparks, of course, is SunTrust Park in Atlanta. And it doesn't score

very well. In particular, if you look at the data just by facility rankings, it's third from the bottom, and it doesn't do so well in most of the other categories as well. So even though you were going over 30 different ballparks, and this is a very comprehensive and detailed analysis, what is it that you found about SunTrust Park? Or I guess maybe what isn't it about SunTrust Park? What seems to be missing from the newest ballpark in the game? Yeah, so one thing that jumped out with SunTrust was there's a parking issue. There are a ton of complaints about parking. I saw something like 112 different complaints. Which was not unexpected, right? You'd have a hard time getting there.

Yeah. It's not necessarily like travel, but actually the parking itself. And so I looked into, again, went and actually just read some of the reviews and saw what people said. And I saw a couple of sort of patterns of complaints. And basically, you can prepay for parking. But then because there's a bunch of different parking lots, it creates some confusion. So you can imagine you drive all the way to SunTrust Park. You've got this prepaid thing on your phone. You get to the stadium, and it turns out it takes you an hour to find your actual prepaid spot because you have spot, you know, 273, and you've got to find it.

And it creates sort of like an additional hassle when you first arrive at the stadium and there was some confusion with reviewers too who went to the stadium expecting to be able to tailgate but then they found out their prepaid parking lot doesn't open until two hours before the game or an hour before the game and they had to kill some time before they could actually tailgate so there's so it just seems like there's some logistical issues with how they're running everything at SunTrust and which is sort of to be expected, I think, potentially for a new stadium. And so they're still kind of working that out. And fans are probably still kind of working that out.

But you see that, you know, a fair amount. If you can imagine just like you go to the stadium and it's you have high expectations. And if your first impression of it is really negative, then it can leave a sort of lasting impact on how you experience the rest of the stadium. I guess I should say, speaking of poor facility ratings, we can get this out of the way. There's one ballpark that stands out the most in terms of these facility rankings and in all the rankings overall. We're going to Oakland. There are 30 ballparks and by the facility rankings, by the data you put out, only one of them has a negative facility ranking. You know, nothing surprising here, but how desperate is the situation in Oakland? What were the good things people said about Hoda Kokalzian, which

I guess you shouldn't call it that anymore? It's Oakland Alameda or something. Yeah. Anyway, so Oakland has terrible facility scores. It has the worst bathroom score in baseball. I think the score is something like a negative 0.5 and the lowest you can go would be a negative one, whereas probably the average is something like a positive 0.7. So Oakland does really poorly. Fans complain a lot about the bathrooms. Perhaps what this shows you is there isn't really too much fooling of fans. If you have mediocre facilities, people will complain about that. We see in other stadiums where they revamp their facilities we see that fan sentiment talking around those parts of the facilities the bathrooms etc goes up yeah fans complain a lot about oakland but they in terms

of like what it does well actually besides like having nice weather which you know can't really say too much about but they uh it does have as it turns out the most popular nachos i think the highest percentage of fans talking about nachos occurs in Oakland. And I think something like three of the top seven or three of the top five are California stadiums. So there's something about nachos out West. But yes, so Oakland has that going for it. Though it doesn't have nice bathrooms or facilities or any of those kind of things, which are nice to have too. And speaking of SunTrust and hot dogs, SunTrust, it seems has the worst hot dogs. And you mentioned,

well, at the top of the hot dogs list, you have AT&T Park, but you mentioned that Dodger dogs only rank fifth on that list, but they get way more mentions than any other kind of hot dog. I don't know if that's just because it's easier for the algorithm to detect the phrase Dodger dogs or what, but you're right that maybe there is value in branding your food, just having some kind of team-specific name for your food, even if it's not the greatest, people will develop an attachment to it.

Totally, I mean, the Dodger dog is, I think it's like a, it's a larger hot dog, I want to say it's something like 10 inches or something like that. And it's been larger hot dog. I want to say it's something like 10 inches or something like that. And, and, um, it's been around since 1958. So that, so it has a kind of brand identity to it. Yeah. But if you think about what we said earlier about hot dogs, it's the most popular food

item at a stadium. And so if you just think about it, fans are going to come to the stadium and buy a hot dog. And so if, but if you give your hot dog a name, it, you know, gives some sort of ownership to the experience and brand value to the experience. So it would be like if McDonald's just decided not to call it McChicken, the McChicken, but just call it chicken sandwich, that would be like, well, what's going on? So baseball stadiums, everyone's just calling a hot dog, a hot dog a lot of the time.

And so there may be some opportunity there for stadiums teams to kind of rethink how they do their basic hot dog and brand it in a particular way that gives some ownership and maybe like the dodger dog you can make it longer or add like a little bit of difference to it that makes it so it's unique to that stadium that may go a long way to improving the sentiment around those hot dogs yeah people really like ballpark barbecue wow yeah it's impressive i feel like it's, you know, like a sleeping giant that baseball has like kind of become a barbecue and burger or could become a barbecue and burger sport more than a hot dog sport. Are there any other observations like that that stand out to you? Whether it's about a particular park maybe that surprised you compared to the public perception or a food item or whatever? Yeah. One thing that really interested me was PNC, which scored well

for a couple of different things. And it has really great family score ratings and both it and Kauffman Stadium do once a week family. Every Sunday they have a family day and people really respond to that. So they know that every Sunday they can come to the ballpark and there's going to be a specific activity for their kids to do, a specific kid giveaway. So that's really great. I think the stadium's kind of figured out a way to tap into that market. But the other kind of neat thing that I noticed about PNC was that 16% of PNC's reviews mention the view. And that's sort of, I think, taken for granted

when we think about PNC. You know, every time you watch it on TV or you go there, you see the, you know, the Roberto Colende Bridge and you see the Pittsburgh skyline. But like, if you had never known what PNC looked like, and someone was like, oh yeah, the baseball stadium in Pittsburgh, your first thought would not be like gorgeous view of, you know, like urban landscape or whatever. And what's interesting though about that is that, I mean, no disrespect to Pittsburgh. So, but you know what I mean? But people would be like, oh, New York skyline or Chicago skyline.

Those things would jump to mind, but not necessarily one in Pittsburgh. But 16% of reviewers are talking about the view in Pittsburgh. And that's really interesting because that's kind of like part of a global experience that everyone at the stadium can have, regardless of where you're sitting. You can see the view. And so it's just sort of like a, it raises in a sense, the floor of the stadium experience. You have something always beautiful to look at while the game is going on and that seems to really resonate with fans and

that may be like a really small dumb thing but you know like that is potentially really interesting insight if you're building a new stadium and you're thinking about air currents and all this kind of stuff but you can also just think about like hey if we turn or we make sure that the outfield is facing a particular way that gives a really satisfying view to the fans, that's going to just create a different sort of atmosphere and ambience for those fans. You have lower in the article, you have a section where you highlight trends in fan sentiment over time. And this is interesting to me. I don't know how well you recall it off the top of your head, but let's find out. You have going back to 2011, you have some information that goes back that seven years and you track facility and family

and fan experience and food and drink ratings over time. And what jumps out to me, there are just some general increases, although I guess in the last few years, ballparks have gotten less family friendly. But anyway, between 2011 and 2012, the first two years in your data set, between 2011 and 2012, the first two years in your data set, what looked like pretty significant leaps on MLB average in both fan experience and facilities. So do you think that that's something where there's some real signal? Or is it just maybe there's less data when you go back a few years? Or what do you think would help to explain those two pretty massive jumps in these two ratings? That's true. There could be some noise in the data. It could be that in general, reviews have gotten more popular. And then the sort of like culture around

leaving reviews online has increased in a certain way that's changed the kind of information that people put into those reviews. And so it could be a problem with the data. So that's a good point. The other thought about it could be that, you know, we have probably just, I'm trying to think like Target Field, Dodger Stadium renovations. Could be a couple of things like that that entered into the stadium picture that drove some of those results higher. I think Marlins Park, was that 2012? I think that was 2012. See, I don't have a real good answer for you, but it could be a couple of those factors.

One, just problem with the data, as you pointed out, or two, those could be driven by changes at some of the large stadiums or new stadiums. Do you think there's any kind of correlation between team success and the ballpark rating? Did you look at that at all? I don't know. I mean, that obviously fluctuates over time how the team is doing, but I wonder whether there's just a more positive association with everything when you're going to a winning teams park. The sort of halo effect potentially of going to winning. Yeah, I looked at the initially, so I don't have a great finding on this yet because it would require kind of more work in a different direction. But when I first started off, that was my initial question too, or one of my initial questions.

And so I looked at, just did a quick correlation calculation for how baseball stadium ratings compared to their home record for those teams over five years and compared that. I actually have all of this data for like all the major sports. So I have something like 300 different stadiums in a database. And so I compared baseball to football and basketball and hockey. So what I found was that in that kind of preliminary bit of research, which I think we need more research for it to be official and all good kind of things like that. But in a preliminary research, I found that baseball rankings or baseball like review scores didn't correlate with the home record or the overall record of the team. But in other sports, there was a stronger correlation. So it was like 0.4 in football, but like 0 or 0.1 in baseball. So it was like 0.4 in football, but like 0 or 0.1 in baseball.

And that's potentially interesting. And, you know, we'll have to do some more work to kind of to make that, you know, a more official finding. But, you know, that sort of jives to with, I think, what we would think about baseball stadiums and baseball stadium experiences is that you don't go necessarily for like a win or lose outcome. It's more about sort of a day at the ballpark. And but if youpark. But football obviously has fewer games. And so like the experience of going to the stadium is potentially more tied or

more related to the actual effect of that game has on your season itself. And so I thought that was pretty interesting. And potentially also that may suggest why to a certain extent we sort of fetishize baseball stadiums is because like the actual experience of going to the stadium kind of like supplants the result of the game in terms of importance and so so yeah definitely that's something to look into with this the other thing i did look into was you can track so i didn't include in terms of like for the results in this report that i published i didn't include team name as one of the keywords that I scored and identified. But if I look at just team names, when fans are mentioning a team name in their review, you can sort of track and plot the sentiment around that over time. And naturally, that definitely correlates with team success. And I looked at that. And so you can see, I looked at

like the past five World Series winners, and you can see the sort of slow increase of the Cubs, then jumping up in 2015 and 2016. And so you can definitely track that. But I left that part of the data out for this analysis. Personally, I like to go to baseball stadiums for the view. You notice you have a whole ranking that's broken out by the food type. So we've talked about how barbecue comes out. Number one, people seem to just lose their minds over ballpark barbecue, followed by popcorn popcorn which i always liked is sort of the snack that takes the longest so i uh it's kind of my preference at a ballpark you figure you're going to spend eight to ten dollars on something anyway you might as well get something that'll take you a few innings to complete and we've talked about

hot dogs hot dogs classic ballpark food very little discussion we'll leave out the fact that cracker jack is nowhere here that's a very specific product that i don't know if anyone buys that anymore but But also peanuts. Peanuts are getting maybe shortchanged or maybe people just don't care about peanuts at the ballpark anymore. But it seems like what you have sort of helped to reveal is that you have your classic ballpark foods and then you have your actual preferred ballpark food. So I know we already talked about this a little bit, but like you think ballparks, you get a hot dog or peanuts and Cracker Jack, and it seems like people don't

really respond very well to that. Generally speaking, do you think that I don't know, there is an under saturation of the the preferred foods? Or I guess it's hard to tell what food stands have been opening in ballparks over time, but like, should stadiums be opening even more barbecue places? Like, should they have competing barbecue places or sausage specialists? Because the hot dog scene seems to be not responded to very well. Yeah, it's a good question. I think too, there's two ways to think about it. One's from like a marketing perspective or from a business perspective. Maybe the margin on hot dogs is so high that stadiums are less incentivized to offer more barbecue because they know that, hey, a hot dog only

costs like $1.17 and we can sell a whole bunch. So there's that side of it, which may affect kind of what stadiums are doing. But yeah, I think that there's potentially sort of like under saturation or under, yeah, under saturation, particularly in some markets. So for example, in terms of barbecue, the most popular barbecue that I saw was in Camden Yards and it's like Boog's Barbecue, Boog's Powell's Barbecue. But you see that like Kansas City and the two Texas stadiums don't really have very popular barbecues. And that just to me seems like those stadiums are missing a huge opportunity to speak to a local regional identity thing and to touch into something which maybe like the fans will

really enjoy like barbecue given these scores and that sort of thing. Is there any additional research that you're hoping to do or would have liked to do? Oh, yeah. I mean, I was really hopeful to get something about like mascots and mascot races and seventh inning stretches. But that kind of stuff is just really hard to put into one bucket because people, the words they use for to describe all those things are just kind of all over the place. because people, the words they use for, to describe all those things are just kind of all over the place. You know, every mascot has a different

name. People call the races, different things, you know, the seventh inning stretch may be called the seventh inning stretch, or maybe referred to as the song that they sing in that stadium. So that kind of stuff is really kind of hard to bucket. And I, if I had more time, I could, you know, do a lot of legwork and figure out what every stadium calls these things and then and track it that way but uh so that's something i missed out on for sure couldn't fall into fan experience i guess as it's part of that maybe yeah definitely and as a fan i mean i love the mascot races so that that definitely uh hit me hard i recently went to coors field where they have a tooth race. Have you seen this? Yes.

Dental dental? Yes. They have a tooth and a toothbrush and a tube of toothpaste that race, which I just thought was brilliant. The only disappointing thing I thought was that the finish line was not made of dental floss. But other than that, it was really well executed so yeah it should just end they all collide and then the toothbrush gets the toothpaste on it lands on the tooth and then everything's taken care of but yeah the dental floss would have been perfect is there any saving soda or is that just something that people are going to hate everywhere because obviously the margin there is like through

the roof but again looking at this graph you have of fan sentiment by menu items you've got barbecue way to the left and all the different categories have at least slightly positive reviews except for soda and there's nothing you can do to dress up soda at a ballpark here you have soda and then it's expensive but is it uniform across the board or were there did you identify are there places that somehow like do soda better or worse yeah i don't think i found any that did soda better. And I think you're exactly right. It's just like a high margin thing. Everyone feels cheated when they order soda because it's like, I'm paying $7 for soda.

I could have just brought in my own Sprite. Here I am. I'm forced to do this because I'm thirsty and sitting in the sun. So it's really just a kind of a bad situation. It's terrible. Listen to me, ballpark marketers. If you could just charge a regular price for soda, people would love you for it.

They would love you for it. Like a soda for two dollars. Forget it. You should. This is your research, not mine. No, I mean, that would be interesting. Or just doing an experiment where they sometimes have dollar hot dog days. What if they had dollar soda days?

If people would just be so ecstatic to have reasonably priced soda. Exactly. Especially for like the afternoon games where it's going to be the hottest. Just give them a break. Like how much are you really making? How much are you really making a year on soda? Your investment in a baseball team is in the team itself. I'm getting worked up here.

It's fine. All right. Well, there's just so much. I feel like you could spend an hour on this page because not only do you have the overall rankings and the category rankings, which are themselves sortable, but you also have breakdowns of all 30 parks. So no matter what team you are a fan of, you can go and find out the specifics for your park. And I guess the big takeaway is that people like ballparks. As you point out on this page, they like some ballparks more than others. They like some aspects of ballparks more than others.

But overall, as you mentioned, every ballpark is like between a 4 and a 4.7 or something like that out of 5, which is high. People like baseball and ballparks. And if you're going to a ballpark, you're going for a fun recreational activity. So you already kind of have a leg up in getting people to enjoy their time there. So that makes it even worse if people don't like your ballpark because you have such a head start on that. So the top five, I guess we haven't mentioned, you've got Oriole Park at Camden Yards, number one overall, then PNC, AT&T, Safeco, and Kauffman.

And the bottom five is, as we mentioned, the Coliseum, SunTrust, Rogers Center, Dodger Stadium, and Yankee Stadium. I guess that would maybe be the biggest surprise here is how low Dodger Stadium shows up. And to be honest, I mean, I've only been to Dodger Stadium once, and I just didn't see the appeal of it right away. I get that it's like now, I guess, the third oldest ballpark in baseball, which is crazy. So there is some history associated don't know, I've heard from other people that you need to spend more time there to appreciate it. But evidently, judging by these ratings, the people who have spent a lot of time there are not rating it all that high. Maybe that has to do with the travel and the parking and the traffic and all of that too. But it's a lot lower than you would probably think. Yeah, it could also be potentially, you know, ticket prices. That's one thing I didn't look into. I wonder if like stadiums

with higher ticket prices, if that causes people to be more critical in their reviews. And, you know, like in the same way that like as Jeff pointed out that soda gets all this negative sentiment because it's so expensive. I wonder if stadiums like Yankee Stadium or potentially Dodger Stadium that might have higher ticket prices, get more criticism from fans. Yeah, I'm not surprised to see the new Yankee Stadium so low. I'm not particularly enamored of it myself. I wonder what this would have turned up for old Yankee Stadium. I would assume that it would have had the same cathedral effect, as you call it, that Wrigley and Fenway did, where it was greater than the sum of its parts. $2.3 billion dollar yankee stadium rates

lower than tropicana fields love it yeah yeah i was pretty nervous about that i was like i can't believe i'm gonna go and this is what it's gonna show and the yankee fans are gonna think i'm garbage but yeah no i've been well i mean they're the ones leaving these reviews yeah mostly that's true yeah yeah i don't know if you are going to be reaching out as part of this but i'm going to be interested to see what kind of feedback you might get publicly or privately from teams yeah because i'm sure they all have their own metrics for how they think their ballpark is perceived but this is definitely the most thorough public analysis that i think i can recall i think it's it's tricky because you have teams and then you also have the vendor who manages a

lot of the in-stadium stuff. And the vendors, actually, it's kind of like an interesting part of the baseball economy. So there's like Delaware North, the seven stadiums. There's one called Levi Restaurants that does another like seven stadiums. And I think there's another one or two that have a big chunk of the market. But like, so Delaware North, who I talked to, hey, they've got the top rated stadium, but I know they also do like Globe Life, which is like 11th or something like that. And so I think they feel sort of at cross purposes or something like that to champion one of theirs and say, hey, yeah, we do a great job. But then at the same time, if another one of their stadiums doesn't rank particularly

well, they feel sort of like at odds with it. So it's hard to get comment from anyone in the industry for that. Interesting. Anyway, there's so much information here and I encourage everyone to go check it out. I won't read the URL because there are a lot of hyphens and it's probably tough to remember if you are in the middle of your commute or something, but I will link to it in the Facebook page. I will link to it at Fangraphs, all the usual places. You've got to go check this out and you can find Max on Twitter at MaxSCHL. Max, is there anything else that we haven't touched on that you wanted to mention? Any particularly funny reviews you came across in the process of doing this or just any other statistical tidbits we haven't touched on?

You know, I think we talked about Oakland, so I'll read the one that jumped out at me. There was one reviewer who reviewed the bathrooms at the Oakland Coliseum. He said they were so gross, the team should just burn down the toilets and start from scratch. That's great. All right. Go read it. Go read the whole thing. Max, thank you for doing this and for coming on to tell us about it. Thanks very much. And thanks to the Facebook community for giving me some initial direction. Again, if you'd like to get in on the raffle, just go to ghcf.org slash hurricane hyphen relief. Make a donation of $10 or some multiple of $10. Forward some proof of that to podcast at fancrafts.com and you'll be entered into our raffle. Those instructions are written down in the Facebook group pinned to the top of the page.

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