We Need To Talk About Alec Bohm... And Corn
In all of our collective confoundment on how Alec can be so incredibly cold and then so incredibly hot, especially in the last outings since the field of dreams game, it got me looking into his numbers a little.
I looked at stats against right hand pitchers, left handed pitchers, how he performs with runners on, and his average at different stadiums, when it finally hit me...
Alec's worst batting average is in Houston at .000 over the past three years, which is a sprawling concrete city with oil fields on the outskirts. At the Braves, he's ~.185 over past 3 years
Alec's Best hitting in the past three years is at Cleveland ~.480. With Minneapolis a close second at around ~.450
I then turned to who he is as a person. What makes him tick.
Now, we all know Alec Bohm is a midwest boy, through and through. He grew up in Omaha Nebraska, on pork chops, mashed potatoes, and buttered ears of corn. He played HS baseball in Omaha, 2.3 miles from Wenninghoff's Farm.
Figure 1: Wenninghoff's Farm and Produce Stand
After graduating, he played for Wichita State, in Kansas, a mere 5 miles from corn as far as the eye can see.
Figure 2: A Corn Field Outside Wichita
With corn on the brain from the field of dreams game, thinking about where he performs well and who he is as a person, it struck me. Houston and Atlanta (his worst performing cities), those are some real sprawling cities, no way there are farms around there or anything resembling his upbringing. Cleveland and Minneapolis (two of his best performing cities), those have to be close to farms and corn. So on this rainy Sunday in Philadelphia, I figured, hey let's do a little statistical analysis on this.
I pulled his averages by field over the last 3 years. I also pulled stadium proximity to farmland, and specifically... corn.
Now, on it's face there seemed to be slight correlation, but with any statistical analysis, you need to clean the data to account for outliers, noise, and x factors.
The Raw Data shows some correlation, with an R value of -.227. Larger dots have higher weight for at bats, so large blue bubble is Philly.
But theres more to this story, and this is where things get interesting...there are some outliers where he is rather far from corn, but hits quite well, like Miami (hitting .282, while 200 miles from corn???). That's when it hit me, maybe corn based foods and other corn related particulate in the air can affect him. In Miami, they are serving tamales and corn tortillas in the locker room as it is a latin heavy city.
So what are other latin/corn heavy food towns? Chase field in Arizona: another field he hits well at, but is oh so far from corn.
Conversely he is hitting poorly in close proximity to corn like in Milwaulkee or Busch stadium in STL? That's when I realized the barley and other grain smells from beer production are screwing up his corn detection. Detroit motor city also confused me, but they are too busy putting it in fuel there. Kansas city has corn, but they are primarily a cattle region, which also negates his corn senses.
That just leaves the oddities of Wrigley and Nat's park. Wrigley is in the windy city, and storms often come in from the east, so he isn't getting a wiff of corn particulate there. Nat's park in DC, at a time when farmers across this country are getting squeezed? You do the math.
These are clear, legitimate outliers, and when I drop those locations from the data, something very sobering becomes clear:
Figure 4: The True Effect of Corn on Alec Bohm's Hitting
I don't know if it's a midwestern thing, but only one thing is now clear to me: BOHM ONLY HITS WELL WHEN HE IS NEAR CORN. This time, regression comes out to an R value of -.704, with an R squared of .5.
That means half of the reason his average is what it is... is because of corn...