UTK 5/10/2020

Neutral Field Net

I went to a ballgame a couple years ago in Cincinnati and sat next to a guy from outside London. It was one of those random ballgame conversations you have. He was in town to meet with Proctor & Gamble and decided to see an American baseball game while he could, despite knowing nothing about it.

I spent much of the game explaining things, which makes one realize that a lot of baseball really doesn’t make sense. The thing that really got him is that fields were different around the league. Sure, the mounds and bases are standard, but the fences? Not at all. I played it as one of the charms of the game, while he said that would never work in “football.” (Yes, I know that there are slight differences in field size and construction in soccer. So did he, but it’s not nearly as pronounced or impactful as walls and distances in baseball.)

Daren Wilman has done amazing things with data over at MLB.com, but I love his spray charts. One of the things that always gets me, and brings me back to that ballpark conversation, is seeing where home runs land. You can overlay them with ay park and it’s interesting to see which shots wouldn’t have gone out, or might have been a wall scraper in another park.

The most famous of these is Barry Bonds, who lost home runs to whatever we’re calling the Giants home park these days. That deep center and big wall actually cost him, despite the fact that he’s one of few that have ever regularly put shots over the right field wall/walkway and into McCovey Cove.

You can lose hours looking through Baseball Savant and I highly recommend it. However, I’ve always wondered if it would be possible to “neutralize” parks while also maintaining the charm and quirks of parks. I’d never want to do away with that big wall and cove in San Francisco - as if we could move it - or the Green Monster in Boston, which was there before the park. (True story!)

Most parks are built with solid walls. For all the talk about moving them at Citi or Comerica, it requires big effort and cost to really change things and in many cases, things are literally set in stone. Or brick. But I think there’s a way.

Let me first set the caveat that I haven’t sat down and figured out what a neutral ball park would be. There’s not some magical distance, though I think what we could do is set home run differences, something like a certain percent over other parks. Looking at this chart at ESPN about home run factors*, we can see that almost exactly half of parks were above 1.0, as expected.

(* Yes, I realize that there are park factors for everything, not just home runs. Go with me for simplicities sake in just calling it park factor.)

There are five parks at 1.2 or greater, so those would be the ones where we’d focus our attention. At those parks, we’d very simply take an existing solution to make hitting home runs harder - nets.

If you can’t move walls back, you can make them higher without causing a significant cost or blocking a number of seats. Nets in the outfield wouldn’t be a perfect solution and certainly aren’t a safety issue, but they’d be easy enough to install and change as necessary. Rogers Centre might need 10 or 20 feet of netting around, while we could put 5-10 feet on the White Sox.

There’s a couple downsides here. First, I don’t know how you play a ball off the netting. It would be a change, but I think teams would adjust pretty quickly to the relatively small number of plays where it did come into play. It might create more triples and triples are exciting, so win-win for my plan.

Second, we can’t do the reverse. We can’t make the walls at Marlins Park or Oracle Park shorter. But we could paint a line, as exists in other parks. That big right field wall complex existence doesn’t mean we couldn’t draw a nice yellow line across half of it, visual considerations aside. We could ground rule it that a ball that hits the wall on the fly in Marlins Park is a home run, period. Extreme? Yes, but it could work if absolutely needed.

That all said, I don’t think we’d have to do a lot of it. The extremes exist and to some extent are part of the game that we shouldn’t try to legislate out of the game. I’d be all for a modern park that had the dimensions of the Polo Grounds. I think the Dodgers should play a series once a year at the LA Coliseum, net and all. I think every major league team should play a game or two at the stadium of one of their affiliates, on a rotation.

We could neutralize fields to some degree with nets, but I’m not sure we ought to. Maybe in the most extreme cases, but there, a more permanent solution might be better in the long run. Then again, I’m all for watching Vlad Junior go for 60 when baseball gets back.