How Are Hampton and Neagle Doing at Coors Field?

by Geoff Young on Sep 20, 2001

First off, congrats to Tony Gwynn on being named the SDSU Aztecs baseball coach.

Second, I’m going to throw out some stat lines for you. Don’t worry, I won’t leave you hangin’ till tomorrow like I usually do. ;-)

Here are the first two:

  IP H R ER HR BB SO ERA
Player A 190.2 217 122 107 29 81 112 5.05
Player B 155.0 168 90 86 26 55 125 4.99

Clearly, neither of these guys is having a terrific season. Here’s what they did last year:

  IP H R ER HR BB SO ERA
Player A 217.2 194 89 76 10 99 151 3.14
Player B 209.0 210 109 105 31 81 146 4.52

Okay, Player A is Mike Hampton and Player B is Denny Neagle. Both signed with the Rockies in the off-season, and almost universally Hampton was expected to succeed at Coors, while Neagle was expected to fail miserably. And for a while, it looked like that would be the case. Here are their numbers through May:



Now here is what they’ve done since then:






 
IP
H
R
ER
HR
BB
SO
ERA






Hampton
77.1
77
29
23
4
24
46
2.68




Neagle
66.0
63
35
33
9
23
56
4.50






One last set of splits for you:



Home



 
IP
H
R
ER
HR
BB
SO
ERA






Hampton
87.2
101
59
53
15
46
48
5.44




Neagle
74.1
81
45
42
13
29
60
5.09







Away



 
IP
H
R
ER
HR
BB
SO
ERA






Hampton
103.2
116
63
54
14
35
64
4.72




Neagle
80.2
87
45
44
13
26
65
4.91






Interestingly, and once again indicating that the value of a single run is less at Coors than in the real world, Hampton is 8-5 at home and 6-6 on the road; Neagle’s won-loss splits are 6-2 and 3-5, respectively.


No surprise that both pitchers have performed better on the road than at Coors. What I find interesting is that so many (myself included) could have been so wrong about their assessments of these two free-agent signings. I wish I had a good theory for why this happened but I don’t. If anyone has thoughts on this, I’d love to hear them. I’m sure Dan O’Dowd would like to hear them, too; somehow I can’t imagine this is what he had in mind when he dropped all that money on Hampton.

    
	
  
 

  

 





	

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