The 2013 World Series champion Red Sox succeeded for a lot of reasons, including a league-leading batting average on balls in play (BABIP). Not only did Boston’s .329 BABIP lead the AL this past season, it was the highest BABIP for any team in more than 80 years, and third highest of all teams since 1916.

Undoubtedly, the Red Sox were a fine hitting team, so it shouldn’t be a great surprise that they produced a stellar BABIP. But, playing in an outstanding hitters’ ballpark shouldn’t be overlooked as a major contributor to good BABIP scores.

After the jump, more on team BABIP and the influences of home ballparks.

Here are the teams with the best BABIP results since 1916.

Unsurprisingly, the list is comprised entirely by teams from two high-scoring periods, 1921-30 and 1996-2013. In addition to the Red Sox, there are four other league champions represented, all of them from the first of those two periods. Not often you’ll see a list with both the 1927 Yankees and the 1930 Phillies represented, much less with the latter having the better result.

But, was the Red Sox high BABIP attributable to their ballpark, or to just being a fine hitting ball club? Looking at best home BABIP relative to overall BABIP yields the surprising result that the 2013 Red Sox failed to crack the top 300 in home BABIP edge, with their .011 home edge placing them tied for 376th place since 1916. I say that that is a surprising result because Boston appears 48 times among the 280 teams since 1916 with a home BABIP edge of .014 or better, by far the most for any team and twice as many times as the second-place Cardinals (the Rockies appear with the greatest regularity with 17 of their 21 seasons represented among those 280 teams, including 6 of the top 10, and 11 of the top 23).

Looking at specific ballparks, these have had the highest BABIP results over a minimum of 30,000 player games.

The preponderance of current ballparks in this list might suggest they are the reason behind the coincident rise in offensive output over the past 20+ seasons. I suspect, though, that such a supposition is illusory. What is more likely the case is simply that, with more home runs and strikeouts over that period, the number of balls in play has dropped rather precipitously. That and the increased likelihood of better results (because of harder swings) when batted balls are put in play accounts for the phenomenon of current ballparks heading this list. Such a hypothesis is consistent with the following result, showing BABIP results relative to league average for different ballparks with a minimum of 30,000 player games.

Adjusting for offensive context yields a greater variety of ballparks in use in different eras, though the list is admittedly still top heavy with current ballparks. While park factors undoubtedly play a role in the above results, the quality of pitching needs also to be considered. Here are the worst ballparks for ERA difference, over a minimum of 1500 games.