DrungoHazewood

Quick summary: In the beginning the pitcher's distance was 45' (or 15 paces). In 1881 it was moved back to 50'. Sometime in there they switched from a line to a 5 1/2 foot box the pitcher had to remain within, and the front edge was 50' from the plate. So a pitcher's front foot had to be no more than 50' away, with a back foot somewhere in the neighborhood of 55'. When they changed to a pitcher's rubber/plate in 1893 they made it the equivalent of the back line of the box, and moved that back 5'. So, 60 1/2 feet. The mound evolved kind of independently, with a few parks having small mounds in the 1880s, and some using flat ground into the 1900s.

Median age of a baseball fan is 104?

What? The Orioles have had nine winning seasons in 30, so it's a near certainty that more of the big homers have been for opponents than Orioles. I wasn't talking about why they've been bad.

I think the vast majority of team construction to match ballpark and vice versa is just a lot of talk. You build a good team and they win, you have a not so good team and they lose. Ballparks mostly just shape the numbers. Unless you let the park fool you, like the Red Sox used to constantly be searching for pitching and standing pat on hitters because they didn't fully get the impact of Fenway. But that was decades ago, nobody is fooled like that anymore. But having said that, I'm very much in favor of this change because it may make it easier to develop and sign pitchers if they're in a little more forgiving environment. Flip side, hitters will complain.

Since the O's have had nine winning records since moving to OPACY 30 years ago, I'm going to say a lot more for the opponents.

I've been Quixotically advocating for exactly this for years.

Except that the Polo Grounds were 275 to left and 257 to right. Bobby Thompson's Shot Heard Round the World would probably not have reached the warning track at 2022 OPACY. But, yes, from LC to RC the Polo Grounds were huge compared to any park today. Center was around 500' with the ~50' tall clubhouse in play. Nobody ever hit it on the fly, much less cleared it. I don't know that anyone hit it or the Eddie Grant memorial just in front of it on the roll.

It's probably the 288th-highest wall in MLB history.

I think it would be drastic and remarkably forward-looking. Major League players outgrew current stadia 30 years ago. It's long past time to start enforcing much longer fence distances.

Nobody is changing their lineup because the Orioles moved the fences back 20-30 feet. Aaron Judge and Giancarlo Stanton and Vlad Jr and JD Martinez are all still going to be there. Both Orioles and their opponents' RHHs will see their home runs go down some percentage. Hank Greenberg didn't sit the bench every time the Tigers went to Yankee Stadium with its 461' LC sign.

Looking at this photo and then doing some measurements with Google Maps, it looks like the the bend in the fence about 40' from the foul pole would go from roughly 360' to about 400'. If they're correct in saying that the fences will move back "up to 30 feet" then the changes aren't going to result in the fence being right at the farthest point of removed seats. If you take the 364' point and drag that back to 394' that puts the fence maybe 3-4 rows in front of the first row of seats still present. If the removed seats were the location of the new fence both bullpens would have to move or be modified. The front of that last section before the bullpens is about 420' from the plate. This photo also makes it look like the RF pole will remain at 330', but then very quickly fall back to a much deeper number. Almost like RF at Fenway, just much farther away. Now I'm hoping that the changes exactly follow the removed seats. We'd end up with at least a 15' fence and LF power alley well over 400'. That would mean a massive blast for a homer there. Unfortunately that doesn't square with the up to 30' statement.

The don't ever change anything crowd never wins.

For about 10 minutes until people got fired for it, and then nobody would ever do anything even slightly controversial. If everyone was always 100% open-kimono about everything then everyone would also be above-board, by the books, and completely boring, too.

Nobody with three functioning brain cells changes significant parts of ballpark architecture based on the current team and opponent's makeup. Maybe 75 years ago with Greenberg Gardens, but that didn't work. I don't think I've ever heard of a team messing with fences and having it definitively impact a team's on-field performance in any way.

Wouldn't it be great if we lived in a world where Elias would just come right out and say "we're making the fences deeper not only because we like the style of baseball that makes possible, but also because we like sticking it to the Maryland Stadium Authority and making them pay for stuff that the Angeloses won't and something, something, conspiracy, something, screw all of you."

They'd have to try to make it dumb. Like some of the new parks that look like someone's teenage kid designed them with MS Paint to have six abrupt angles in the fence for no reason besides they could do it. The best parks are organically weird, like Ebbets Field was 290 to RF because there was a street at 300'. OPACY has no such restrictions, so it should be pretty simple to make it blend in with the classic look of the rest of the place.

I don't know if you're the only one, but I am more interested in this than probably any player acquisition they'll make until 2023. I've been arguing in an invisible, anonymous, ineffective, interweb-y kind of way for something like this to happen across the league for years. Good to see it worked.

It's not going to be 30' at the foul pole. I mean, it could be I guess, but that would make that dimension 363', which would be the longest LF foul pole dimension in probably 50+ years. Me, I'd take it all the way. Go old Griffith Stadium on them, when it was 402' down the line. In 1927 Goose Goslin had 17 homers, all on the road.

Yes. What they should do it move the Orioles' bullpen back to where the visitors are now, and put the visitors in foul territory where the heatmaps suggest the most line drive foul balls end up. Just for spite.

I know one of your raison d'êtres is to look below the surface to see the rotten core that the rest of us won't admit is there, but I think at least part of the rationale for this is to have a more interesting form of baseball in Baltimore. To give the young pitchers a fighting chance instead of getting called up from Norfolk and living in constant fear that missing your spot by 3" will result in a 3-run homer every single time. Of course this is an iterative change, it's going to lower homers at home 10%, 20% or something. But it's at least going in the right direction. Although it might make signing the annual Maikel Franco a little more challenging, as it'll lower his home run total from 11 to 9 and make it harder to get that big payday he's angling for next year.

Relocation is like a nasty divorce. Relocation while stealing the old city's team name is like a nasty divorce so your wife can marry your best friend. If I were in charge relocation wouldn't be a thing. If you couldn't make go of it in the current city you either sell or you donate the team to the league. In an extreme case you could contract and then add an expansion team somewhere else. The entire concept of stealing another city's team, name, history, colors is an abomination.

Old Yankee, prior to the 1970s renovation, was 296 to the RF pole, not much more than 325 in short-medium RC, and 461 to the LC alley. That's unbalanced. OPACY is going to be like 378 to RC and 380-390 to LC? League Park in Cleveland was 375-415-460-420-340-290. Boston's old Huntington Avenue Grounds were 350-440-530-??-280, in 1901. In '08 they pushed RF and CF out to 320 and 635. I'd kill to see Major Leaguers play in a park with a 635 sign. And, of course, the LA Coliseum has hosted baseball games. When the Dodgers were there in the late 50s and early 60s it was 251-320-417-375-300. And for a 2008 exhibition it was 201-280-380-352-300. RFK in DC was something like that for 1980s and 1990s exhibition and old timers games.

The data is right there. Camden Yards is a very good HR park, and a pretty good run park. Yearly data is very noisy, but that's clear from looking at multiple years.

Yep. I want the turf area in CF to be in play. 480' to center with a 25' wall.

Weirdly he had more homers on the road than at OPACY from 1992-2001. If my math is right.