There’s just an awful lot of noise going on, so attributing their home/road split to the home park is a poor idea. I’m glad you aren’t someone who just looks at road numbers and says, “That’s how he’d hit in a neutral park,” and I think we can agree that his true ability is somewhere between his home and road numbers, but I disagree strongly that using the splits is at all useful. You’re much better off simply adjusting for the park factors, or using a stat that does it for you.

There are, of course, as you point out, problems with park factors as well. They are NOT a perfect measurement, by any means. But they remove an awful lot of noise, and are far better than home/road splits.

Thanks for ignoring my confrontational tone, by the way! I can get overly argumentative, and I appreciate the engagement here. It sounds like your position is a LOT more nuanced than your original post suggested.

I am still not convinced that current models are effective at evaluating park effects on particular players stats….if they were, home/road splits in stats that attempt to incorporate such information should be much smaller.

What you want to do to analyze a player’s true level of performance is to use park factors. StatCorner has probably the best park factors, because they break it down to, say, whether the park helps RHBs hit doubles but severely hurt LHB homers (here’s Texas: http://www.statcorner.com/team.php?team=TEX&year=2011&leag=A_L). This helps you to see if a batter is particularly helped by their home park.

Alternately, if you don’t want to do the work, stats like wRC+ already adjust for park factors. That’s how you can see at a glance that Kinsler’s has been better than an average hitter in his park by 20%, while Zobrist has been better than an average hitter in his cavernous park by 15%. Their parks help to mask the fact that Kinsler hasn’t been that much better than Zobrist. However, if you just look at their away numbers, you would conclude that Zobrist is an .803 OPS player to Kinsler’s .727, and that’s just plain inaccurate.

TL;DR: a severe home/road split often causes people to overadjust for how much a home park helps a batter, since it is not a statistically valid way to correct for park.

Thinking Kinsler is an elite hitter is like confusing Justin Upton for a legitimate MVP candidate because of his performance in the desert. Elite hitters are elite everywhere, not just is uber hitters parks.

This contract brings the standard risk of any deal paying a player more than five year out when he’ll be 35 at that point, but I think the financials are very fair for both sides, and if I were a Rangers fan, I’d be pleased.