Over the years, the study of baseball statistics has yielded some extraordinary insights and produced a culture of surprising sophistication, both within the game and among those who enjoy it. Managers may be too beholden to the save rule; announcers may blather on about veteran leadership, and the fan in the seat next to you may not betray an understanding of what a bad idea the sacrifice bunt usually is. But the level of knowledge they all have about the underlying mathematical realities of the game is pretty impressive.

Still, the most basic and important insight of sabermetrics is constantly overlooked. What sets baseball apart from the other major team sports is that baseball fields don’t have fixed dimensions. This means that you have to understand park effects to understand the game. Everyone, of course, knows this — it certainly didn’t take Bill James to point out that left-handed power hitters have a good time of it in Yankee Stadium, or that Shea Stadium is a good place to pitch. Precisely because everyone knows this, though, park effects are understated, and often go more or less ignored unless they’re preposterously extreme.

Take the Arizona Diamondbacks, who scored fewer runs per game than all but three National League teams this year, and had the fourth-best ERA. They’re been rightly praised for their commitment to youth, and rightly derided as something of an illusion, as they gave up more runs than they scored this year. Few, though, have noted that for the last two years their home park, Chase Field, has been every bit as good a hitter’s park as Coors Field — the notorious home of their National League Championship Series opponents, the Colorado Rockies.

Because of this, few have noticed that the team is preposterously unbalanced. Playing half their games in Chase Field masked Arizona’s offensive ineptitude and hid their pitching prowess. The Diamondbacks’ ERA+ (a parkadjusted measure that indexes ERA on a scale where 100 is average) was 114 this year, the best in the league. Their OPS+ (which indexes heir on base plus slugging averages on the ame scale) was 88, the worst. A m o n g N L playoff teams this decade, only the 2001 and 2002 Atlanta Braves have had a larger difference.

This is just a shorthand method, and it overstates how weak the Diamondbacks’ offense is. As Nate Silver of Baseball Prospectus has pointed out, this is an exceptionally young lineup that performed well, and in line with preseason expectations, over the last third of the season — something that could be taken as the natural growth of inexperienced hitters who are better than their seasonal numbers. Still, this team is as heavily reliant on its pitchers as any NL playoff team in recent memory. This is something that doesn’t necessarily play in its favor when its second- and third-best starters are Doug Davis and Livan Hernandez, durable veterans with fringe stuff who are a lot more reliable over 200 innings than they are over five.

Despite this, the Diamondbacks have an excellent shot in this series, and not just because ace sinkerballer Brandon Webb can start three games backed by an overpowering bullpen. The Rockies, after all, are also a pitching-heavy team. Their ERA+ was six points higher than their OPS+ this year — not overwhelming, but a fair indication of their strengths. The Rockies have half of a great lineup, as MVP candidate Matt Holliday, potential Hall of Famer Todd Helton, Rookie of the Year candidate Troy Tulowitzki, and rightfielder Brad Hawpe are about as good as any foursome in the league. But their deep (if merely solid) rotation, devastating relief corps, and team defense were at least as important to their cause.

The Rockies are solid all around, and they’re on an incredible hot streak. They may have needed wretched play from the Mets and San Diego Padres just to make their improbable charge into October — but they’ve also won 17 of their last 18 games. Momentum may be next to nothing in baseball, but if any team has ever had it, this is the one.

Still, the Diamondbacks are dominant at one aspect of the game. When Webb is pitching, backed by closer Jose Valverde and filthy setup men like Tony Pena and Brandon Lyon, they’ll be as tough to score on (relative to the environment) as any team you’re likely to see. The Rockies’ strengths don’t translate quite so well in a short series.

One element that may come into play and give the Rockies a decisive edge, though, is Denver itself. Coors Field is nowhere near the hitter’s park it once was, as the Rockies use a humidor to keep the baseballs from shriveling into cue balls. But it’s still a brutal place to play. Boxers, fighters, and endurance athletes have long gone to Denver to train because it’s five miles above sea level. The thin air doesn’t just make curveballs break less, it also exhausts athletes: There’s just less oxygen to deliver into the blood.

This can be all the worse in Coors because of its vast outfield, which sends outfielders running all over the place. Plenty of easy fly outs turn into base hits, which in its turn keep already gassed pitchers on the hill longer than they’d otherwise be. In this environment, not only is the Rockies’ experience at altitude an advantage, so is their bullpen. It isn’t as spectacular as the Diamondbacks’ is. But it’s very deep; a huge asset in a place where pitching an inning can feel like a title fight. The Diamondbacks have home field advantage, but if they squander it by not doing everything they can to win the first two games (using their shutdown relievers as early as possible in the second game, for instance), they’ll regret it.

Because the AL is so much stronger than the NL right now, this series just doesn’t have the weight the NLCS ought to have. Both of these teams are much, much weaker than the Boston Red Sox and Cleveland Indians, and a World Series classic is not in the making. That doesn’t mean, though, that this series won’t be enormously entertaining. Both teams were built the right way, around homegrown prospects, and they’re young — between them they have three regulars, two starting pitchers, and one key reliever over 30. These teams are as hungry and exuberant as any you’ll ever see playing this late in the year. If you’re a Mets fan disgusted by a veteran team that kicked away a sure thing down the stretch, or a Yankees fan groaning at a team that takes October for granted at times, this series could remind you why you love the game in the first place. The winner, as they say, will be the fan. But I’ll go with the Diamondbacks in seven, and enjoy seeing how they get there.

tmarchman@nysun.com