Compared to other International League venues, Sahlen has been a mild pitchers’ park in recent years. ZiPS uses four-year park factors, slightly weighted toward the most recent season, in its calculations. With 100 being a neutral field and 110 being a park that increases a given statistic by 10%, my data has Buffalo’s park factors as 96 for runs, 100 for all hits, 95 for doubles, 96 for homers, and 95 for walks and strikeouts, with nearly even splits for lefties vs. righties.

Unfortunately, it’s not quite as simple as declaring those the park factors and calling it a day. It’s unlikely to be a terrible projection for the park effects in the majors, but it’s a bit lazy to not go further. Park factors only measure stadium effects relative to the rest of a league, making them a bit tricky to use for league-to-league comparisons. Imagine if the International League played all its games at Coors Field. The league’s teams would all be playing in a neutral park relative to each other, but Coors Field is a decidedly un-neutral park in terms of its playing environment!

In the past, when I’ve tried to take a guess at how completely new stadiums are going to play, I’ve applied a generalized model that uses park characteristics like distances, fence heights, altitude, and local meteorological data. At 404 feet at its deepest and 325 feet down the lines, Sahlen’s distances are fairly ordinary relative to major league parks, which average around 400 and 330 feet respectively. It is a bit asymmetrical, so it’s mildly surprising I get neutral left vs. right splits for hitters. Starting with the Google Maps satellite image of the stadium, I made a graphic showing the basics of the Sahlen layout:

From the park characteristics, my model guesses that in the majors, Sahlen would naturally have a 102 park factor for runs, 102 for all hits, 101 for doubles, 103 for home runs, and 99 for walks and strikeouts, with slightly more doubles and triples from left-handed batters. The only problem is that there are errors inherent in this kind of approach because parks are more than just those characteristics. Things like the hitters’ eye and the exact wind currents at the field can wreak havoc on these results. Prior to SunTrust Park’s debut, my model estimated that it would be a slight hitters’ venue, with a home run factor of 107 (111 for lefties vs. 103 for righties). In practice, while it does favor lefty sluggers slightly more than righties, it’s been a slight pitchers’ park in terms of home runs so far.

We haven’t had major league games at Sahlen (well, until now), but we do have a lot of players who have switched between teams and leagues. Undoing minor league translations and looking at every player who changed parks among Triple-A teams, and between Triple-A and the majors, we can get a rough idea of the league vs. league offense that comes down to different parks. Using players over the last decade, I got an estimate that International League parks decrease offense relative to major league parks by about 3%, while the Pacific Coast League parks increase offense by about 10% by themselves. In other words, if major league teams played for a year in PCL parks, we’d expect the league offense to go up by about 10%, assuming no other changes. With these estimates, I can then get an estimated park factor for each Triple-A stadium, should they be transplanted into the majors: