Park Factors

Nobody publishes park factors for college softball fields, so we estimated them. A park factor of 1.10 means about ten percent more scoring at that field than a neutral site with the same teams; 0.90 means ten percent less. The estimate comes from a ridge regression that controls for who actually played where, which matters far more in college than in the pros: the typical Division I team plays about 24 home games against a schedule it partly chooses, so raw home-road splits mostly measure scheduling.

Ridge shrinkage pulls extreme estimates toward neutral, and the applied factor in the download (pf_applied) is halved again before it touches any player metric, the standard guard against overcorrecting on a season of data. Even shrunk, the spread is real: factors run from 0.76 to 1.24, enough to move a hitter's season line noticeably. These factors feed the adjusted metrics in our WAR framework.

This dataset is free to use under CC BY 4.0: use it anywhere, including commercially, with attribution to Pioneer Pennant (pioneerpennant.com).