Everything You Never Wanted to Know About Kauffman Stadium

Part 2 (it's got pictures of Farrah Fawcett and Zoe Kravitz)…

Today, let’s start here…

The people who build ballparks often neglect to talk to ballplayers before they build them which is how the Minnesota Twins (another one of those politically incorrect teams named after “people” and I can’t believe we haven’t heard from the Twins of America lobby) wound up playing for 27 years in the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome, a ballpark with a white ceiling with little round white lights that looked just like baseballs.

And if you’re thinking, “Man, those Minnesotans sure are dumb” stop thinking that because we were getting ready to make the same mistake here in KC.

When the Star’s Editorial Board was invited to the architects’ offices to look at drawings of that rolling roof they wanted us to build, the roof was white. When I asked if the roof was going to actually be white if we built the rolling roof, apparently none of the people involved had considered that or thought it might be a problem.

(Trust me, if they ever convince us to build a new ballpark they’re going to fuck it up somehow, which is another column I’ve already written.)

Which brings us to…

The Kauffman Stadium Field Level Scoreboards

In baseball’s never-ending quest to put advertising everywhere and make us much money as possible, the Royals eventually added field-level scoreboards (the ones built into the outfield wall) and apparently it didn’t occur to anybody that at night those brightly lit scoreboards would blind players, coaches and umpires and make it hard to tell if a fly ball had been caught in front of one.

A visiting third base coach described the problem:

When that right field scoreboard is lit up like a Vegas billboard advertising Wayne Newton and the All-You-Can-Eat-But-Don’t-Really-Need Buffet (and turns out, Wayne is still performing) third base coaches have a hard time seeing whether a ball is caught and smart coaches depend on the home crowd noise (cheers for a home team outfielder’s catch, groans for a miss) to know what happened.

So if you’re ever sitting in the outfield above those scoreboards and can organize everybody to have misleading reactions when the visiting team is batting you can help the Royals win a game and I can’t believe the Royals aren’t paying me to suggest this.

The Bullpens

The right field bullpen is considered the better bullpen by pitchers and when I asked a Royals relief pitcher why, he said because you can get back to the clubhouse from the right field bullpen without going on the field, but when you’re in the left field bullpen you’re stuck and the only door out there is the door to the restroom.

The Royals had their bullpen in left field for a while and the reliever I talked to said he hated it and when I asked why, he said:

“No drunk girls from Rivals.”

Rivals is the sports bar at the top of right field and when you see a player sign a ball and toss it to a female fan, it would not be totally surprising if it had the player’s hotel room number on it, which is more likely to happen on the road because that’s where most of the ballplayer hijinks take place and is one of the main reasons teams play worse on the road and better at home.

As a perceptive coach once pointed out to me:

“Did you ever notice the Chicago Cubs didn’t win shit until they got lights?”

No lights meant all day games and every night off in Chicago and a bunch of Cubs playing with hangovers.

And while we’re talking about Baseball Hijinks, a member of the Royals grounds crew told me that some teams (he assured me the Royals didn’t do this) make sure the visiting bullpen mound is different—higher, lower, steeper or more shallow—than the game mound because maybe it will take an opposing pitcher a few pitches to adjust to the new mound and if you see an out-of-town reliever come in and get whacked on the first couple pitches, that might be part of the reason.

As far as I know—and these days I don’t know very far—nobody checks the bullpen mounds and makes sure they match the game mound and speaking of things that aren’t uniform…

The Warning Track

It seems insane (which describes any number of our current National Policies) but there is no standard width for a Big League outfield warning track.

When the Royals had tall outfielders like Lorenzo Cain and Alex Rios and Kamikaze Outfielder Alex Gordon, they widened their warning track and all tracks are different, so outfielders have to remember what city they’re in and how many steps they can take on the warning track before slamming into the wall and if you make me Commissioner of Baseball (we’ve had worse) I’d fix that right after I forced every team owner to sit in the stands at least once a home stand and pay $15 for a beer.

And while we’re on the subject of warning tracks…

Some outfielders are afraid of the wall and slow up as soon as they step on the warning track and let catchable balls fall in, but the right way to play the wall is get to the wall as quickly as possible – feel for it with your throwing hand or glove – and then come away from the wall to make the catch.

Now here’s why you might not want to boo an outfielder who doesn’t do that.

When I first started covering baseball I had an amateur’s point of view: players should give the mathematically improbable 110% on every play.

But careers and seasons can be ruined by injury and do you really want your All-Star outfielder diving into the stands when your team is down by 10 runs in a game that doesn’t matter?

Which means players need to know when to back off and when to dive into dugout suites and here’s Mike Moustakas making the right choice in a 1-1 game against Baltimore in the American League Championship Series.

One last thing about watching outfielders: when the ball goes up, don’t watch the ball because people think routine pop flies are going to be homers. Watch the outfielder instead and he’ll let you know if this is going to be routine play or an ESPN highlight.

The Grass

When you’re looking at the field some parts look dark and some parts look light and when I asked why, I was told the blades of grass are bent different directions by the mowing and the light parts are reflecting the stadium lights or sun and the dark parts are bent the opposite direction and casting shadows.

No idea how they get it so geometrically precise (I was going to spend a day working with the ground crew, but the Star fired me first—not that I’m bitter or anything) and the part that should interest you is this:

A bouncing ball slightly changes direction every time it hits a different section (you can see that if they show the ball in slow motion) and that’s called “snaking” and I’ve seen a playoff game lost when an outfielder didn’t anticipate the ball changing direction on its final bounce.

A checkerboard pattern will have more “snaking” than a sunrise pattern (more opportunities to change direction) and I don’t know how this information improves your life, but I feel confident you’ll eventually repeat it to someone who cares just as little as you do.

Grass length is also a huge deal and grounds crews will cut it shorter if they have a young athletic infield (it makes the infield faster) and longer if the infield can remember disco, once wore platform shoes and ever had that poster of Farah Fawcett on their bedroom wall.

A grounds keeper told me he balked when he was asked to make the grass short on the right side (the team had a young first and second baseman) and longer on the left side (and an old third baseman) and they also have tricks for making the ground hard or soft in front of the plate (depending on whether the home team likes to bunt, which is happening less and less often) or overwatering the area around first base if the visiting team likes to steal and when the Royals were stealing a lot of bases in 2014 and ’15 every time they played the Chicago White Sox the area around first base looked like the Okefenokee Swamp.

The Dirt

A friend of mine played in Kauffman Stadium for the very first time and I asked what he thought and expected him to talk about the atmosphere, stands or fountains, but what he said was:

“Best dirt I ever played on.”

Generally speaking players don’t give a Norwegian Brown Rat’s Ass about craft breweries or fountains or exploding scoreboards.

Players care about things like grass and dirt and lights and dugouts and clubhouses and how far the equipment room and indoor batting cage are from the field and whether the bullpen features drunk girls willing to give out phone numbers and one of the reasons I like Kauffman Stadium is they got a lot of that right and I don’t trust them to build a new ballpark and not make mistakes.

OK, as is often the case, we seem to have strayed from the main subject which is “dirt” and the question you should be asking and I did is: what makes dirt good?

My player friend said bad dirt tends to get divots when a baserunner goes by and infielders spend a lot of time smoothing out the dirt in front of them so they don’t get a bad hop and the subsequent dental bills and this player said he spent the entire series in Kauffman looking for a divot and never found one.

The Royals use some exotic mixture of dirt, although when I asked what it was, I was told, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they left out some secret ingredient just like your aunt when you ask her for her lasagna recipe and she tells you, but forgets to include that pinch of Ecstasy that makes her lasagna so popular.

Which leads us to our final item…

Time of Day, Temperature and Wind

The dirt bit reminded me that when we have one of those Hotter-Than-Zoe-Kravitz-In-That-Catwoman-Suit Days, base runners need to start their slides sooner later in Day Games because the dirt dries out and they don’t want to slide past a base which we’ve all seen happen.

So when you see the grounds crew come out and spray the dirt between innings that changes the speed of the surface and ballplayers (and smart fans) should pay attention.

During night games a home run in the first inning might be a long out in the ninth and smart, veteran catchers will also use the wind when it’s blowing in – “Go ahead and crush that pitch, it ain’t going anywhere” – and try to keep the ball down when it’s blowing out and I just now realized we haven’t talked about foul territory and the fact that Kauffman has less than it used to (they added those dugout suites) and less foul territory means higher batting averages because pop ups that used to be caught for outs are now in the stands.

We’re going to wind things up with another Rusty Kuntz video in which he explains outfield communication and lets you know that even in the most routine plays – like catching a fly ball – a bunch of things are happening and it’s way more interesting if you know what they are:

I hope I’ve given you enough information to make games more interesting and if you still find Baseball boring, that’s OK; lots of people don’t have the attention span required to enjoy baseball and if you’re thinking, “Hey! I think I just got insulted!” don’t worry, with your attention span you’ll forget it ever happened.

Enjoy the next 159 games.