Any thoughts to naming the anomaly/protuberance in right field in the new park?

When Safeco Field opened, A-Rod once complained that a groundball felt like it had gone through a pool by the time it got to him at SS. Playing below sea level, next to the Elliott Bay, will do that, I guess. It also doesn't help hitters to have that bay wind blowing in from LF; and then there are the glare problems as well.

If only I had the money to hire a grad student for this project!

Personally, I would think the oppressive heat on the batter would be more of a hindrance than the humidity on the ball. At least my experience playing softball here would make me think that way.

I think that a perhaps better test than Poo-holes would be to compare HRs hit by a selection of visitors to STL to the HRs hit by the same selection as visitors in a low-humidity city. That still leaves as a problem how to control for park effects per se.

or, even better, get some fool to provide temperature and humidity data for each game and model HRs as functions thereof.

And I agree. OO.o's graphing abilities are terrible. Plus it's hard to use. I'm gaining experience with R now and it's so much nicer. There's a wiki with a list of many different graphing options with example code to replicate it. That's how I did the radial plot, with some help from GIMP.

34.1 HR/500AB -- Home, Pujols
37.0 HR/500AB -- Away, Pujols

I'm not sure that this is a significant result, but looking at the general population, hitters tend to hit more home runs at home than on the road:

16.1 HR/500AB -- Home, MLB 2009
14.3 HR/500AB -- Away, MLB 2009

Doing the roughest possible adjustment, you'd figure that Pujols is coming up about 5 HR/500AB short at home compared to on the road. That would boost his career total by 25 HR (~7%.) Not a huge deal, but if the humidity in St. Louis is helping him hit home runs, either his "home cooking" is really bad or he's been an unlucky hitter in St. Louis.

that's entirely to rational and reasonable for MLB. It sounds like something the NFL would require.

but we really need some experimental data to show the effects on how balls with differing moisture contents carry, all else constant. Anybody got that?

Given the use of the humidor in Denver, it would be interesting if balls were required to be stored in humidors at all parks, sort of the way that they keep pucks in a cooler for NHL games.

Twin Cities has nothin' on StL's humidity, and Albert has no problems hitting them out here in the mid summer.

It's actually the reverse that is true. More humid air is less dense than drier air. Cribbing from Wikipedia:

This occurs because the molecular mass of water (18) is less than the molecular mass of air (around 29). For any gas, at a given temperature and pressure, the number of molecules present is constant for a particular volume. So when water molecules (vapor) are introduced to the air, the number of air molecules must reduce by the same number in a given volume, without the pressure or temperature increasing. Hence the mass per unit volume of the gas (its density) decreases.

The Coors effect (and San Diego's) derives more from elevation and temperature. Coors is just so high that even cool weather can't counteract the elevation. Petco though, being so close to the ocean stays cooler to go with its low elevation. I'm not sure how it compares exactly to, say, AT&T park. Orientation and prevailing winds might be another factor.

FYI, Andrew Clem just posted his preliminary Target Field diagram this weekend. I don't know if you feel more or less confident with that compared to your measurements of the seating diagram, etc., but I thought you'd be interested all the same.
Excellent. I spent 30 minutes in the 3D seat finger trying to figure out how much the overhang hung. I eventually made the wildish guess that it was orthogonal to the foul line and it appears that Clem made the same decision. I feel better about that. It seems he also concluded that it's straightaway center that is 404 and not the corner to the left that is. Good good.

Finally, thanks!

I confess to a dearth of knowledge when it comes to physics, but I wonder if the humidity frequent in Minnesota summers might help reign in some of the deep flies, similar to the effect of the denser air in San Diego (though not to that extreme). I would wager that Denver and Dallas have drier heat than Minneapolis does in the summer months, though the Coors humidor will make up for some of that difference.

This is an awesome post, sean. When I saw your LTE in the CoC mentioning a desire to do this project, I really hoped we'd see something come of that urge. This post alone exceeds my wildest expectations, and there is at least another one coming. Can't wait for it.

FYI, Andrew Clem just posted his preliminary Target Field diagram this weekend. I don't know if you feel more or less confident with that compared to your measurements of the seating diagram, etc., but I thought you'd be interested all the same.

Ah, who am I kidding? they are both going to be below average bats, no need to get my hopes up.

This is cool! Looking forward to parts 2 thru X.