It’s no secret that there is a Tale of Two Loneys: Road Loney and Home Loney. In his career, Loney has hit .270/.335/.378 at home and .323/.379/.532 on the road. We can speculate why he has had so much success on the road. Maybe the dimensions of Dodger Stadium don’t suit his approach. Maybe he doesn’t see as well at Dodger Stadium. Maybe there are too many off-the-field distractions in LA. So I set out to look at some batted ball data to see whether we could pinpoint what his problems might be at home.

Before we look at those plate appearances where the ball is put into play, it’s worth seeing if he has more difficulty making contact at home. In 2009, Loney has struck out in 11.0% of his home plate appearances, compared to 8.8% of his road PAs. His career K/PA is still higher at home, but not as extreme as this year (12.1% home vs 11.1% road). So it seems that he has slightly more trouble making contact at home.

From his splits mentioned above, it’s clear that he doesn’t have the same power at home as he does on the road. One of the questions I wanted to answer was whether he hit more doubles at home that might have turned into home runs on the road. Below is a distribution of his hits for 2009 (through September 23).

If some would-be-homeruns were turning into doubles at home, we would expect to see more of his home hits being doubles. We don’t see that here. In fact, instead of hitting home runs at Dodger Stadium, Home Loney hits singles. From this data, it doesn’t look like the park is turning homers into doubles. It appears that he just doesn’t have the same power at Chavez Ravine. If only he could raise his homer per hit rate at home to match his road rate, we’d be looking at a very nice hitter. With 170 hits and 13.5% of them being homeruns, we would expect 23 homers per year. I would happily take that.

Since it is clear that his slugging at home is not a result of bad luck due to the park allowing fewer bases per hit, I wanted to look at his outs to see if he is just hitting into bad luck. From the Gameday hitchart data, here is the distribution of his in play outs:

Yikes! He has twice the rate of popouts at Dodger Stadium than on the road. The popouts are essentially taking away from his flyballs as his other rates hold steady. My first thought here is that maybe the Dodger Stadium Gameday stringer was coding some flyouts as popouts. But looking at the x-y coordinates, Loney’s popouts tend to travel a shorter distance at home on average (about 105 feet at home vs 125 feet on the road). Of course, the fewer fly balls the less chance of homeruns and the more popouts the less chance of getting any hit.

Furthermore, while his popouts both at home and on the road tend to go to the left side, his home popouts average about 25-30 feet closer to 3rd base. It seems that he’s slower getting around on pitches at home and when he does make contact, he pops out. Plus his flyballs at home travel about 5 fewer feet than his road flyballs. This is a big problem and indicates that he is not making good contact at home.

I don’t know if there is a mechanical difference in his swing at home or if he is just not seeing the ball well, but the batted ball data shows that Loney is not a victim of Dodger Stadium and has not been unlucky at home. He has real issues in making good contact at Chavez Ravine. A number of commenters have suggested it before and after looking at the batted ball data, I agree: solving Loney’s contact issues at home should be a top priority of Dodger management. If his home batted ball types resembled those on the road at all, he would be a tremendous asset.