Walltimore

[Sanity Check]

Question for the baseball stats junkies that may very well know where to find this.

Is there any data available that can tell us how many home runs the Orioles have lost to "The Wall" both this year, and since inception, and also how many our opponents have lost?

It's easy to see it when we lose one, and it hurt us in both playoff games this year, but I'd love to know over a season, whether it has been worse for us, or better in terms of results.

It still doesn't take away from the fact that a right handed free agent might find our dimensions detrimental to their results, and choose to go someplace that will look a lot better on the back of their baseball card.

[gtman55]

What I hate about the wall is I think it affects our right handers approach at the plate. I think they make a conscious effort to avoid pulling the ball. The team went way too far and maybe someday they'll move it in 10-15 feet.

[JR Oriole]

2 minutes ago, gtman55 said:

What I hate about the wall is I think it affects our right handers approach at the plate. I think they make a conscious effort to avoid pulling the ball. The team went way too far and maybe someday they'll move it in 10-15 feet.

I don't know how it possibly couldn't impact our right handed hitters' approach. They have to look at that stupid wall 81 games a year.  You can only hear "it would have been a homerun in 28 other ballparks" so many times before it gets really old.  Figure out the dimensions where things would be homers in 15 other ballparks and plant the wall there.  

[Aristotelian]

I don't know of anywhere that has exactly what you are looking for. Statcast will tell you for every ball hit how many parks it would have gone out of, but I don't know how you could easily translate to one number of HR added/taken away. 

For what it's worth, we were #2 in road HR, #3 in home HR, #4 in road OPS, #8 at home. Slight disadvantage but it's not like it makes the difference between an amazing offense and a bad one. Plus, presumably the other team has the same challenges.

Theoretically, it should be an efficiency that we can exploit in building our team. Players that would be more valuable to us than other teams would be:

• LH power hitters (Gunnar, Kjerstad, Cowser, Mullins, O'Hearn)
• Speedy left fielder who would be CF on most teams (Cowser)
• LHP's who can negate opposing LH power hitters (bullpen has a good set of LHP's)
• RHB's who don't need to hit HR to be productive and/or with opposite field power (Westburg and Urias might fit this but Mountcastle not so much)

However, I wonder whether we have gone too far in focusing on developing LHB. Now that we traded Norby, we really don't have much RH in the system. This hurts us when matched up against good LHP.

 

 

[CTBear]

At first, I was like whatever. They clearly ran a lot of numbers and determined it would benefit us. Now, I despise it.
 

Elias and Sig tried to hack the system to a degree by stacking a bunch of lefties and moving the wall while the shift got eliminated. In theory, it makes sense but we’ve yet to complement the plan with dominant LH pitchers of our own and 2 years straight we’ve been shut down in Game 1 by a lefty. 
 

Also, an original comment was that it would help us bring in pitchers but that’s clearly been proven wrong. It’s always been more about money than pitching in a hitter friendly park. 

[theobird]

3 minutes ago, Aristotelian said:

I don't know of anywhere that has exactly what you are looking for. Statcast will tell you for every ball hit how many parks it would have gone out of, but I don't know how you could easily translate to one number of HR added/taken away. 

For what it's worth, we were #2 in road HR, #3 in home HR, #4 in road OPS, #8 at home. Slight disadvantage but it's not like it makes the difference between an amazing offense and a bad one. Plus, presumably the other team has the same challenges.

Theoretically, it should be an efficiency that we can exploit in building our team. Players that would be more valuable to us than other teams would be:

• LH power hitters (Gunnar, Kjerstad, Cowser, Mullins, O'Hearn)
• Speedy left fielder who would be CF on most teams (Cowser)
• LHP's who can negate opposing LH power hitters (bullpen has a good set of LHP's)
• RHB's who don't need to hit HR to be productive and/or with opposite field power (Westburg and Urias might fit this but Mountcastle not so much)

However, I wonder whether we have gone too far in focusing on developing LHB. Now that we traded Norby, we really don't have much RH in the system. This hurts us when matched up against good LHP.

 

 

I agree with most all of that. What we need is a good Rh hitting speedy defender out there whose strength at the plate is contact and hitting to all fields. How easy will it be to find a guy like that? Probably not real easy. 

[Three Run Homer]

The only argument for keeping Walltimore is that we have two excellent center fielders on our roster (Mullins and Cowser), so we are better positioned than our opponents to defend a huge left field.   

We shouldn't need Walltimore to attract pitchers anymore.  We're a winning team now.