RNA Showgrounds - Where bats come to die?

The RNA Showgrounds, home of the Brisbane Bandits, is hard to score at. My unconcious mind developed this opinion, probably while watching yet another pitching dual, and now it can't be dislodged. But is it true? Let's find out.

Firstly, let's look at each stadium in the ABL and its field dimensions. All measurements are in feet (I love the metric system, but you've got to stick to baseball tradition).

Stadium	Left	Centre (R/C/L)	Right
Baseball Park	330	380/400/380	330
Blacktown Baseball Stadium	321	400	321
Brisbane Exhibition Ground	310	395/395/360	305
Coopers Stadium	320	390	290
Melbourne Showgrounds	285	327/348/305	266
Narrabundah Ballpark	335	400	335

The elephant in the room here is undoubtably the Melbourne Showgrounds - where both the right and left field fences are extremely short. Sluggers must salivate at the thought of them. The RNA Showgrounds, on the other hand, seems to be somewhere in the middle - a relatively deep centre field but short down the line. Perhaps I'm just imagining things, then?

Refusing to believe that my mind was playing tricks on me, I decided to look a little deeper. The average number of runs scored per game, for both the home and away teams, is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Average Runs Scored at Each Venue

Now we're getting somewhere! My hunch is now starting to look a little more accurate. The stadiums in Brisbane, Sydney, and Perth seem to be a lot more pitcher friendly - while in Melbourne, Adelaide, and Canberra the batters eyes light up.

Not content to leave the point here, I decided to calculate the Park Factors for each venue. This provides a more accurate determination, taking away biases inherent in direct comparisons like the graph above. For example, what's to say that the true reason for the lower amount of runs scored in Brisbane isn't due to the Bandits having great pitching but poor offence? The Park Factor removes these biases by factoring in on the road performance. I used the standard version of the formula:

If a stadium scores a value over 100 then it favors the batters, relative to other ballparks in the competition. Likewise, if it scores under 100 then it favours the pitchers. So what did I find? See for yourself:

Stadium	Park Factor
Baseball Park	72
Blacktown Baseball Stadium	92
Brisbane Exhibition Ground	60
Coopers Stadium	114
Melbourne Showgrounds	165
Narrabundah Ballpark	116

So there we have it - based on all scores from all ABL games to date, Brisbane has shown to be the most pitcher friendly stadium. Why? I honestly have no idea - I'd be very interested in hearing peoples theories on this. Melbourne Showgrounds, on the other hand, favours the batters to a ridiculous degree.

And here lies the challenge ahead for the Bandits - their next series is in Melbourne, and an away series against Adelaide is on the horizon. In order to maintain momentum, the Bandits pitchers will need to develop strategies to counteract the nature of the ballparks they'll be playing in - and some pitching styles may be better suited to this than others.