- 17 hours ago
Throughout the more than three decades that Coors Field -- home of the Colorado Rockies -- has been a part of the MLB universe, it's consistently bestowed upon baseball fans offensive fireworks the likes of which have never been seen, much to the delight of those who love seeing a deluge of scoring and chagrin of those who yearn for old-school pitching duels. Afterall, it's a very well-known fact that the thin air of Denver and its massive outfield have conspired to turn the ballgames played at Coors into a real life video game.
But even with that knowledge, when I (Alex) took to charting the discrepancies between what the Rockies' bats were able to do within the cozy confines of Coors contrasted against what those very same bats did when taking their show on the road, it still left me stunned. And while nearly every big leaguer in every season hits way, way better at Coors than they do elsewhere, there's one notable exception that caught me completely off guard.
But even with that knowledge, when I (Alex) took to charting the discrepancies between what the Rockies' bats were able to do within the cozy confines of Coors contrasted against what those very same bats did when taking their show on the road, it still left me stunned. And while nearly every big leaguer in every season hits way, way better at Coors than they do elsewhere, there's one notable exception that caught me completely off guard.
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00:00In 1991, after generations in the making, Major League Baseball finally granted an
00:05expansion franchise to the city of Denver, Colorado. This team, known as the Colorado
00:11Rockies, began play in 93 and spent their first couple seasons cohabitating with the
00:15NFL's Denver Broncos. In 95, they moved into their very own brand new ballpark, Coors Field.
00:23Situated a mile above sea level, the dry, thin air there is extraordinarily conducive to
00:29baseball soaring, uncontrollably and constantly, when whacked by a swinging bat. To call the
00:35sprawling ballpark hitter-friendly would be like calling water wet or Antarctica cold.
00:41This is well known to baseball fans far and wide, but despite being keenly aware of all that,
00:46when I decided to chart my own deep dive into the numbers, it still surpassed my wildest expectations.
00:59Quick detour to let you know Secret Base is now on Patreon. Subscribers get early access to videos on
01:05top of all sorts of additional content that's housed exclusively over there, so if you haven't already,
01:10make sure you get yourself a subscription. But for now, back to this one.
01:17Let's start with a quick look at that inaugural Coors campaign of 95. Based on slugging percentage,
01:23or total bases per at-bat, the Rockies were the third-worst hitting team on the road. Yet despite
01:29what for the other 27 teams is an awfully strong positive correlation between road performance and
01:34home performance, the Rocks used Coors as a launching pad to post a home slugging of .556,
01:41not just the best home slugging in the bigs that season with no one else even within 70 points of
01:46them, but no team had ever come within even 25 points of such a high number. And while isolating
01:52road performance and home performance are each two completely independent, mutually exclusive data
01:58sets, the outlier of home slugging is so strong that it lifts their overall slugging as high as
02:03number two in MLB. Really think about that for a sec. The road sample, of which their third worst,
02:10constitutes half of the overall sample, so there's extreme overlap baked in there, and yet they're still
02:16somehow able to overcome to that degree the extreme road gravitational force dragging them down.
02:22But even the strike-shortened 95 will prove to be a mere appetizer to the next year.
02:28In Coors' very first full season, it cranked up the dial even more. Way more.
02:34Thanks to the lack of normalized, uniform ballparks, one could reasonably argue that a pure way to assess
02:40the level of a team's hitting proficiency is isolating just their 81 road games,
02:44thus rendering moot any inherent advantage or disadvantage provided by their home park.
02:50Well, in 96, the Rockies weren't just dead last in road slugging, there was a cavernous 17-point
02:57gulf separating them from the next worst expos. By no means is it any sort of be-all end-all,
03:03but one could thus reasonably argue that, in finishing that much worse than anyone else in road slugging,
03:09the Rockies employed the worst collection of bats in the bigs in 96. And yet Coors took that same
03:16collection of bats and gave them a slugging so high that by far the worst road slugging team
03:21was transformed into the third-best overall slugging team. And as a member of the National League,
03:28they didn't even get the benefit of utilizing a designated hitter, a benefit bestowed upon the only
03:33other teams in their range. Among fellow NL clubs who had to send a pitcher to the plate in lieu
03:38of a DH,
03:39no one else is within 40 points of them despite that atrocious road performance.
03:44This compels more of a light being shined on their 96 home performance.
03:49With a slugging of 579 across those 81 games, it's by far the highest figure on record, about 50 points
03:57higher than any non-Coors dwelling team. For perspective, through the first 15 years of Mike
04:03Trout's career, his slugging was 570. Coors Field turned their lineup of road ineptitude into nine
04:09Mike Trout clones and then some. 579 beats by over 20 points the career sluggings of a few other guys
04:17you may have heard of. Stan Musial, Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, Frank Thomas, and Hank Aaron. Even when
04:24narrowed down to a single year, plenty of longtime great sluggers, even in their very best season,
04:30fell shy of such a lofty mark. And here are even more ways to contextualize it. That manifested in
04:37their four fearless leaders, Ellis Burks, Andre Scalaraga, Dante Bichette, and Vinny Castilla,
04:43all recording over 215 total bases at home. Which is gobsmacking. Here you can see that every MLB team
04:52combined, in the 29 years from 1941 to 69 combined, had zero such players. Same story spanning the 15
05:01years from 1980 through 94 before Bichette did so the prior season. And yet just the Rockies,
05:08just in 96, had four such players. The guy who was fourth on the team in home total bases still
05:16produced
05:16a total barely ever seen across the preceding half century. And no other big leaguer that season
05:22except Mo Vaughn racked up as many as 190 total bases at home. I'm also partial to their RBI totals.
05:30Here you can see from 1951 to 95, there wasn't a single instance of a big leaguer driving in as
05:36many
05:36as 90 runs at home, before all of a sudden in 96, not one but two guys on the same
05:42team drove in not just
05:4490 but 99 plus runs at home. Then across the subsequent 29 years and counting, not a single
05:51instance of anyone topping 91. Perhaps you're curious how this translated to team runs scored.
05:58I got you covered. Their 303 runs away from Coors have him comfortably ensconced and dead last for
06:05road scoring, but at home they more than double that with more than 50 runs left over to boot.
06:10It amounts to over 8.1 runs per game. Just jaw-dropping stuff. Combined with the more than
06:186.9 runs per game their opposition scored, a fan attending an average game at Coors Field in 96
06:24could expect to see more than 15 runs scored. As a brief aside, on top of their quartet of home
06:31destroyers, the 96 Rockies actually had a fifth bat that, on a rate basis, was even more destructive
06:37within the confines of Coors. Larry Walker. He missed close to half the season, so his volume
06:43isn't up there with those other guys, but I prefer to focus on the fact that missing nearly half the
06:48season means he played in over half the season. Yet even in that sizable a sample, he married a
06:54historically high home slugging of 800 with a truly pitiful road slugging of 307. Taking a look at that delta,
07:03no one with comparable playing time in a season has ever even come close to such a discrepancy.
07:0896 Larry Walker was the ultimate Coors Field merchant. The very next season, the Gold Glove
07:15right fielder rode one of the very greatest all-around seasons of all time to a runaway MVP campaign.
07:21In my opinion, the best way to frame Walker's 97 season is through a historical lens of big leaguers
07:27with the most total bases plus stolen bases in a season, of which he had an astounding 442.
07:34For decades beforehand, basically no one came close. For decades afterward, basically no one came close.
07:42Thus, one might figure that this occurred as a natural byproduct of playing at Coors.
07:47Yet, in an M. Night Shyamalan-esque twist, that inexplicably couldn't be further from the truth.
07:53The very same Larry Walker, who was the ultimate Coors merchant in 96,
07:58happened to hit 9 more dingers and slugged 24 points higher on the road than at home in 97.
08:04So don't ever let anyone impugn Walker's MVP or dismiss it as a function of playing his home games
08:11at Coors. In reality, it's completely Coors-proof. Let's go ahead and stay in Funland for just a bit
08:19longer by looping in the following five seasons on top of Coors' first two for a snapshot of its
08:24first seven seasons before we'll get to a noteworthy inflection point in 2002.
08:29I've narrowed down from a million to six some charts that I think most comically capture the
08:34essence of Coors' feel during this era of 1995 through 2001. They had a home road total base
08:40delta north of 3300 with said homer delta north of 350. Here is how the other 29 teams stack up.
08:49If we swap in runs for home runs, similar story. 29 squads who each individually display at least
08:56a resemblance to being on the same page as to production at home versus on the road. Then the
09:01Rockies in a northeastern galaxy light years away, not even reading out of the same book.
09:07Here's a glance at total bases on a per-game basis. Even across a sample as lengthy as seven years,
09:14look at that home performance just jumping off the charts combined with the remarkable
09:18serendipity that they just so happened to be dead last on the road. But that home performance still
09:25allowed him to take the overall elevator to the very top, even above every DH-wielding club which
09:30comprised spots 2 through 10. Gotta drop down to the D-backs all the way down here to find the
09:37closest NL challenger. Same story with runs per game. Seven years worth of being dead last on the road,
09:44yet at north of 7.1 runs per, not just MLB's best mark at home, but the best by a
09:51margin of over a run
09:52in a third and more than two runs better than the NL runner-up. Overall, they still managed to pull
09:58off a
09:58silver medal with 5.64 runs per game, less than a tenth of a run behind Cleveland, a gap which
10:04would
10:04be overcome and then some had the Rockies likewise been blessed with a DH, and a number good enough to
10:10top any fellow NL squad by nearly a half run. After those seven years of zaniness, we reached that
10:16aforementioned inflection point. In 2002, to combat the arid atmosphere at Coors in an effort to make
10:22offensive numbers less eye-popping, the Rockies installed a climate-controlled humidor chamber to
10:27keep baseball stored in a damp environment. This prevents them from otherwise drying out and
10:33shrinking in the low humidity, basically simulating their original storage warehouse. That can be
10:39reflected here with Homer Deltas. We can revel in the pre-humidor days in which they've got four of the
10:45six all-time most lopsided discrepancies. Within the window of 1995 to 2000, while they hit at least 63
10:53more dingers at home than on the road in four of those six seasons, no other team in that period
10:57had
10:58a single campaign in which that surplus exceeded 35. Since 2002, however, while the Rockies still have
11:05by and large gotten a bigger home field homer boost than anyone else, you can see how it's at least
11:09come
11:10down to earth a bit. But while that mitigation applies to homers, Coors' thin air and massive
11:16outfield still prove too much for even the humidor to overcome in any significant manner when it comes
11:20to metrics like slugging percentage, its volume-based cousin total bases, and runs scored. Here is a
11:27look at slugging deltas. The Rockies' own 10 of the 12 highest single-season figures, and one of the
11:33two exceptions hails from the massively abbreviated 2020 campaign, and the other occurred during the
11:39Hoover administration. So for all intents and purposes, they've got each of the 10 highest in
11:45the last 90-plus years, and 5 of those 10 are post-humidor. Total Bases is even more amusing,
11:51virtually immune to the humidor's effect which barely makes any dent at all. They've got 11 of the top 12
11:58and 20 of the top 26 all-time single-season discrepancies, and remember, Coors only existed
12:04without a humidor for 7 seasons. Also, all 6 non-core seasons in the top 26 occurred decades before it
12:12was even built. In fact, going all the way back to 1956, there have been 20 instances of a team
12:18having a season with at least 300 more total bases at home than on the road. And all 20 belong
12:24to the
12:25Rockies. If you're interested in that discrepancy in percentage form, they've got a similar stranglehold.
12:31Excluding strike or COVID-marred truncated campaigns, they've got each of the 18 highest full-season
12:38rates of the last 50-plus years, and each of the 12 highest full-season rates of the last 90
12:43-plus years.
12:45Coors' humidor is also ultimately pretty powerless at curbing home inflation as to runs scored.
12:50The Rockies are owners of 10 of the top 11 and 20 of the top 26 such home road discrepancies,
12:56with that also turning into a perfect 20-for-20 in the 70-plus years since 1956.
13:02And percentage-wise, they've got each of the 9 highest full-season rates of all time,
13:074 of which occurred post-humidor.
13:10Last but not least, throughout the first 31 years of Coors Field's existence,
13:15it was one of 69 different ballparks that hosted at least one MLB contest.
13:20In that time, Coors played host to 82 games wherein both teams scored at least 10 runs,
13:26more than triple that of any other venue except Globe Life Park, which it still more than doubles.
13:32Granted, many teams have their total split across multiple home stadiums in this time,
13:37but even accounting for that barely changes the calculus.
13:40The next most such home games anyone played during this period is the Rangers at 38,
13:44and likewise that's the only team they haven't tripled in that regard.
13:48I can even isolate a stretch in 99 of less than a month where 6 such shootouts occurred at Coors.
13:55Juxtapose that against New Bush Stadium, which in the 18 entire seasons from 2008 through 2025 combined,
14:03played host to zero.
14:05So while there's nothing quite like the cartoonish offensive boost provided by Coors
14:09throughout its 7-year pre-humidor run, its presence in the decades since its O2 installation
14:15diminished that boost only slightly.
14:18Really, it underscores just how mighty a force Coors remains,
14:22still flexing its muscles atop its mile-high throne, turning batter after batter into royalty.
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