Quote:
Originally Posted by satchel
I'm pretty sure that the game recognizes the hitter's "type" and that this affects gameplay accordingly. A right-handed pull hitter will rarely go the other way, etc.
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"rarely" is, of course, a subjective assessment, unless you've actually collected data, which I haven't either. What I have done is study over the course of a number of games, whether or not batter types mattered as far as defense decisions (particularly infield shift and guard line). My conclusion was that it did not matter, that this part of the game design was more cosmetic than substantial.
OTOH, I did not attempt to assess this in relationship to park factors, because frankly one would have to do a lot of data collection to get valid results. In the absence of that, I'd be willing to take on faith the proposition that if the park had a strong bias toward one side or the other, and you had a bunch of pull hitters with that orientation, you would get a statistically significant result.