Size Matters

With the preface that I'm not trying to piss on anyone's parade...

Yesterday's homer outburst was fun to watch (at least when we weren't pitching!), but much of it comes down to a difference in parks, not so much the quality of the team's offense. As I said in a post a day or two ago, GAB's ballpark yields about 40% more homers than RFK does. The main reason for this is the size of the park.

I stole some diagrams from our good friends at Diamond-Mind baseball, and overlaid the two parks so you can get an idea of what kind of size differences we're talking about.


RFK, you can hopefully guess, is in blue. GAB was in Red, but the pretty purple color (damn color blending!) seems appropriate too.

You can see the huge difference in territory in the two gaps. If you hit it in the first 5-10 rows to right at GAB, it's on the warning track at RFK. Same thing, to a lesser extent, in left. It also shows one of the reasons that batting averages are so much lower at RFK: there's a ton of foul territory there. I haven't seen the stats on it lately, but in '05, RFK had more foulouts than almost every other park, roughly 2 a game.

The Nats hit four homers last night, and I'd guess from watching them, that only two of them would've been out at RFK.

--Ryan Church's first-inning homer landed 3 rows or so just to the left of the gap in right. That's probably a warning-track shot at RFK.

--Brian Schneider's fourth-inning homer went a few rows back in right-center, and likely would've stayed in the park at RFK.

--Ryan Zimmerman's is probably out at RFK, especially because he pulled it, but it's a lot closer than the monster shot it looks like here.

--Ryan Church's second homer would've hit off the Wall of Stars.

--Ryan Freel definitely wouldn't have had a homer either.

The Nats did a good job of taking advantage of their surroundings. And I'm not trying to denigrate the offense. I'm just saying that you need to consider the context of events.

RFK has a strong negative effect on the team's batters, so looking at their raw stats doesn't really do them justice. At the same time, our pitchers would perform worse in a different environment.

But this also means that you can't look at an offensive explosion in a bandbox of a park against crappy pitchers and think that the team has finally figured out how to hit. The truth lies somewhere in the middle.

The next question, then, is how will this affect the team next year?

Here's an overhead of the new park: I haven't seen much on the dimensions, but what I can dig up:
332 to left, 377 left-center, 409 center, 370 right-center, 335 to right.

The picture makes those dimensions look pretty generous, but the gaps are 10-20 feet closer in the new place than they are at RFK (where they're about 390). They're much closer to GAB's dimensions (379 to the gap in left, 370 to the gap in right), than they are to RFK.

That's not to say that it's going to play the same way. Atmospheric conditions -- humidity, wind, air pressure, etc -- play a large role.

But it certainly seems like we'll be due for more offense next year, even before they run out and sign Andruw Jones. (HA!)