Horses for Courses and Ballplayers for Ballparks

How they affect each other...

According to the internet “horses for courses” is a British proverb and means different people are suited for different things like a horse might win on one race course and lose on another, but since it’s a British saying in reality it probably means something like, “I’m supposed to be Earl of Popinjay-on-Valium and you’re supposed to spend all day calling me ‘guv’nor’ and shoveling shit in my garden.”

Moving on.

According to the internet, in 1912 Fenway Park cost approximately $650,000 to build and the owners of the Red Sox, Gen. Charles Taylor and his son John I. Taylor, paid for it and built it on a piece of land they owned which helps explain baseball’s most famous piece of ballpark architecture, The Green Monster.

Before cities decided to bend over and grab their ankles for any sports franchise that was feeling frisky, team owners were expected to buy the land they wanted to use for a ballpark and they might be limited by a public street or somebody else’s property and that inability to bulldoze anything that got in their way led to some of the weird dimensions in old ballparks.

If you couldn’t go out because you were blocked by a public street, you went up instead and built a high wall so routine fly balls weren’t home runs and according to the ever-helpful internet, another reason for high walls was to keep fans from watching ballgames for free so apparently wealthy team owners were also miserly dicks way back in 1912.

OK, so old ballparks sometimes had quirks based on the available real estate.

Milwaukee and County Stadium

According to the amount of research I’m willing to do, Milwaukee’s County Stadium was the first publicly-financed ballpark and that was in 1950 and the American public has been getting screwed by sports teams ever since.

If cities were willing to pay for ballparks, team owners would be crazy to pay for one themselves, so these days if you want a sports franchise you have to build them a stadium and also give them your first-born male child and let the team owner sleep with your wife and make internet porn videos and while that’s a bit of an exaggeration, it’s still not that far off.

(I made up the part about first-born male children, the porn stuff is totally accurate.)

OK, so Milwaukee screws over the rest of America by building a team a ballpark and here are the dimensions of County Stadium:

What you might want to notice is the field was symmetrical because the builders weren’t limited by inconvenient public roads or someone else’s property so that became the new norm: symmetrical ballparks which had all the personality of a middle-aged tax accountant that took one too many Xanax.

(There’s a good side to that and we’ll get to it if I ever quit making derogatory jokes about team owners.)

Architects get funky

The first example that comes to mind is Baltimore’s Camden Yards, but I’ve already exhausted my dwindling desire to do research so if there’s an earlier example we’re going to ignore it because it won’t change the point I’m about to make and here it is:  

At some point ballpark architects said wouldn’t it be fun if we put some of the quirkiness back in ballparks even though we don’t have to and they started adding unnecessary features like short porches and weird corners and a windmill you had to putt a golf ball through to get the ball into a clown’s mouth and the trend got completely ridiculous and Houston’s Bankrupt Energy Company Field is a great example.

Look at that ballpark’s left field and there’s a short porch and a scoreboard and some arches and a wide assortment of uneven surfaces. Also, lots of nooks and crannies and while I’m familiar with nooks and have no idea what a cranny is, I’m still 100 percent positive Houston’s ballpark has way too many of both which means a batted ball can carom off in some weird direction an outfielder can’t anticipate.

Houston’s worst feature was Tal’s Hill, a centerfield incline that Big League outfielders hated and just in case you didn’t blow out a knee when you hit that slope running full speed, some genius added a flagpole on the field of play so stumbling outfielders also had a shot at a fractured skull.

I can pretty much guarantee you the guy who came up with Tal’s Hill never played baseball professionally. (If I’m wrong you can have your money back, assuming you give me any and most of you don’t.)

Eventually, someone in the Astros organization came to their senses and had Tal’s Hill removed which was a great idea because it allowed the Astros organization to focus all their concentration on cheating.

Now here’s the good part about uniform ballfields:

I’d never heard it put this way before he said it, but former Royals outfield coach Rusty Kuntz once said Kauffman Stadium “plays fair.” Those boring uniform dimensions means games are generally decided by the athletes and not some forgotten architect who drank one too many Red Bulls while designing a ballpark.

Kauffman Stadium giveth and taketh away

Semi-recently Salvador Perez hit a deep fly ball to right field in Fenway Park and Royals announcer Ryan Lefebvre said it would have been a home run in 22 Big League ballparks, but since they were playing in Boston it was just a long out.

That kind of information is useful and helps fans understand what they’re seeing.

In 2010 when I started covering the Royals some fans were upset that the team didn’t hit more home runs (26^th overall that year) but hitting a lot of home runs in Kauffman Stadium wasn’t realistic, the park’s just too big.

I once asked Royals GM Dayton Moore how many home runs Adam Dunn would hit if he played in Kauffman Stadium (in 2010 Dunn hit 38 homers for the Washington Nationals) and Dayton said:

“Adam Dunn would never play here.”

Dunn made his money hitting home runs and wouldn’t want to play in a giant ballpark so the Royals would have to overpay Dunn to get him to play in Kauffman and then the Royals wouldn’t get the home runs they paid for.

Fans of Moneyball never seemed to accept the fairly obvious conclusion that a big ballpark limits home runs. Also, walks and home runs are related because if you’re only going to hit singles, pitchers aren’t afraid to pitch to you, so if you don’t hit a lot of homers, don’t expect to walk much either.

Everything’s connected.

Hall of Fame hitter Tony Gwynn hit .338 lifetime, but averaged just 52 walks every 162 games and Gwynn once said pitchers weren’t scared of him until there was a runner in scoring position.

And now back to the 2010 Royals.

The dimensions that limited home runs helped when it came to doubles (they were 16^th) and triples (11^th) because a line drive that got past an outfielder rolled all the way to the wall which is located on the outskirts of East St. Louis. And that big outfield also meant balls in play had more chances to fall in and the 2010 Royals had the second-highest team batting average in baseball.

OK, so a team built to play in Kauffman Stadium should concentrate on line drive hitters and outfielders who can cover ground and catch opponent’s fly balls and if a new ballpark has different dimensions the Royals have been developing the wrong players.

The most poorly-understood aspect of team sports

Some of the first people to get excited about analytics were fantasy baseball enthusiasts because they thought analytics would help them select players in their fantasy drafts.

In fantasy baseball you win through individual players’ efforts (which is part of why they hate the bunt because it doesn’t help them win their fantasy baseball league) but in real life you win through team effort (which means the bunt is sometimes useful, which is a whole different column) but the fantasy mindset has leaked into the Real World and the emphasis on an individual’s numbers is part of why we see selfish baseball; a leadoff double and the next three guys make no effort to move the runner over and three outs later he’s still at second base.

The aforementioned Ryan Lefebvre (and if you’re reading this, “Hi, Ryan!”) has pointed out that far too many players will strike out looking because they’re still waiting for their pitch with two strikes. Players know that if they hit 30 home runs they’re going to get rich so they sometimes keep looking for a home-run pitch in two-strike counts and don’t want to settle for getting the ball in play, which is actually a big deal because so many teams are overly-focused on offense and willing to play lousy defenders.

(OK, I’m now officially off-track and I think it’s only fair to blame Ryan Lefebvre, shown here attempting to explain what Rex just said.)

In any case, one of the least understood aspects of team sports is how players affect one another and that was brought home to me when the Royals wanted Adalberto Mondesi on the infield because he could go back on pop flies really well which meant the outfielders could play deeper. Eric Hosmer was great at scooping throws which meant the rest of the Royals infield could attempt plays they wouldn’t try with Billy Butler at first base.

Now let’s say the new park has a short right-field porch which means your right fielder needs less range and your second and first basemen’s ability to go back on pop flies is less important and you’re also going to want some left-handed power hitters and some pitchers who are good at getting the opponent’s left-handed hitters out and that changes what pitches they throw because a cutter from a right-hander is a good pitch because it will run in on a left-handed hitter’s hands while a changeup from a left-hander might not be so hot because changeups tend to go down and drift arm-side so a lefty throwing a lefty a changeup might see it drift into most lefties power zone: down and in.

Getting the picture?

This is the kind of stuff you need to think about when you put together a team because you’re going to play 81 games at home and you want to have an advantage when you play there.

All this demonstrates why ballpark dimensions are important and how they change the players you want to acquire and/or develop, but if you ask someone from the Royals organization if they’ve thought about a new ballpark’s dimensions I’m guessing they’d say we’re getting way ahead of ourselves to which I’d reply:

Are we?