More on Mid-Season Home/Road Splits
by Asher B. Chancey, BaseballEvolution.com
June 26, 2008

It seems I may have jumped the gun a little in reporting on Milton Bradley’s home/road splits. What I should have done before I touched pen to paper (or finger to keystroke) was checked all of the usual home/road split hot-beds. For, if I had, I would have rather quickly discovered that not only has Aramis Ramirez has been pretty bad this year (1070/780 OPS split), but Kosuke Fukudome has looked downright dead on the road (1040/624). And rather than announcing that Milton Bradley was about to make history, I could have announced that Bradley and Fukudome together were about to make history together in a truly interesting year indeed, as we could see not one but two players hit the 400+ mark in terms of OPS split-gap.

So, since I properly called out Bradley and Josh Hamilton yesterday, and just called out Ramirez and Fukudome just now, perhaps we should take a moment to look around the league at some other incredulous splits:

Carlos Guillen's home OPS is over 300 points higher than his road.

Magglio Ordonez's home OPS is almost 300 points higher than his road.

Garrett Atkins, predictably, is at 927/694. Matt Holliday is better at 1035/852.

Jacoby Ellsbury is in the eights at home, but in the sixes on the road.

Lance Berkman is 200 points better at home, though 1200/1000 is not bad.

Chipper Jones is 1252/977, again not bad on the road.

A-Rod is 1128/886.

Going the other way with it, we find some guys faring better on the road:

Manny Ramirez is actually 100 points better on the road.

Vlad Guerrero is 180 points better on the road.

Casey Kotchman is over 200 points better on the road.

Finally, while looking at the Texas Rangers revealed that Bradley and Hamilton are two of the most overrated players in baseball right now, in Florida and San Diego we see some enormous parks masking the talents of two of the most underrated players in baseball in Dan Uggla and Adrian Gonzalez. Both of these players currently have a road OPS over 1.000, which is incredibly rare these days.

Gonzalez has a .265 average with an .842 OPS at home, but has a .324 average with a 1.001 OPS on the road.

Right now Uggla is struggling to the tune of a .257 average with a .942 OPS at home, but excelling with a .326 average and a 1.076 on the road.

It seems pretty clear to me that if the Rangers had not traded Adrian Gonzalez to the Padres, we'd probably be talking about him the way we used to talk about Travis Hafner right now.

And consider this - Uggla's overall OPS is 1.010, compared with Chase Utley's .994. But Utley splits out at 1.043/.943, while Uggla has the afore mentioned .942/1.076. I don't think anyone in the league would put Uggla over Utley right now, because no one ever hears about the Marlins and because no one takes Uggla seriously (and because he is a bad fielder), but if Utley were traded for Uggla tomorrow, and Uggla got to play home games in Philadelphia while Utley played home games in Miami, it seems to me that Uggla would suddenly be demonstratively better than Utley.


Questions? Concerns? Comments? Asher lives in Philadelphia, PA, and can be reached at asher@baseballevolution.com.