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Image credit: (Photo by Emilee Chinn/Getty Images) Run environments vary widely across the 11 full-season minor leagues. On top of that, individual ballparks within those leagues can vary in terms of run-scoring context. Baseball America helps you make sense of it all with its annual installment of minor league park factors.
Park factors presented here are basic comparisons of minor league teams’ production in home games compared with road games. This includes a comparison of batting-plus-pitching statistics. The result is park factor ( PF ), where 100 is average and 120, for example, would signify that an outcome is 20% more frequent in home games than road games.
Conversely, a PF of 80 indicates that outcome is 20% less common in home games. The multiplier ( Mult ) column halves the impact of park factor to reflect that players play only half their games at home. In this way, park effects can be applied directly to players’ statistics.
A Note About wOBA For years, I emphasized comparisons between runs scored totals at home versus on the road as the foundation for park factors. While that method is directionally accurate, it tends to overstate park effects. That’s why I now emphasize weighted on-base average, or wOBA park factors.
The randomness of run scoring is heightened in extreme environments, where one minor event can have a major effect on the bottom line. The nature of the long baseball season tends to “scale up” these distortions, especially in the minor leagues, where free bases—walks, stolen bases, wild pitches, errors, etc.—are more common.
Because wOBA weights the components of run scoring—walks, singles, doubles, triples, home runs—it produces a narrower band of results, one less subject to the inherent randomness of baseball. The spread of values in 2024 park factors illustrate this effect. Park factor values for runs scored range from Triple-A Iowa at 132 at the high end to Double-A Arkansas at 67 at the low end, a spread of 65 percentage points at the extremes.
A handful of PF values even exceed 30% above or below average. Park factor values for wOBA range from Double-A Reading and High-A Asheville at 114 to Double-A Arkansas at 83, a spread of about 32 percentage points. All values but one fall into a range of 15% above or below average.
In my view, it is far more likely that the difference between minor league park extremes is closer to 30 points rather than 60. International League (Triple-A) Pacific Coast League (Triple-A) Eastern League (Double-A) Southern League (Double-A) Texas League (Double-A) Midwest League (High-A) Northwest League (High-A) South Atlantic League (High-A) California League (Low-A) Carolina League (Low-A) Florida State League (Low-A).
