Floors, Fences, and Fly Balls

The very first big story I ever wrote, way back in 1988 — THIRTY EIGHT YEARS AGO, YIKES! — was about why it’s so hard to win on the road in the NBA. I was 21 years old, still in college, knew nothing about nothing, but I look back at that kid fondly. I was boundlessly curious. I was hungry to make it in this crazy sportswriting business. And, thanks to the encouragement of my first sports editor, Gary Schwab, I learned that if you make the calls, a lot of pretty famous people will call you back.

I talked with Hall of Famers Lenny Wilkens, Pat Riley, Rick Pitino, Jack Ramsay and Rod Thorn, among many others, for that story. It was mind-blowing to me. During the day, I’d be studying computer programming and John Updike*, and in the evening I’d be talking with these sports giants about whether home teams get more favorable calls and how much the home crowd’s energy plays into actual play.

*Alas, I use “studying” loosely here.

I do not tell you this to take a trip down memory lane — though as I get older, those trips become more and more tempting — but to say that the most shocking thing I learned was from Pat Riley. I’d asked him all the same questions I asked everyone else and was about to hang up when HE said: “Wait, aren’t you going to ask me about the Boston Garden floor?”

“The Boston Garden floor?”

And he proceeded to tell me how that parquet floor was an absolute nightmare. “The NBA should outlaw that floor,” he said. “It’s a disgrace to the NBA. There have to be 50 dead spots. There are half-inch cracks where you can get your foot caught.”

Then he laughed and said, “And those %*#(#* know exactly where each and every one of them is.”

This is not the point of this story — we’ll get there, I promise — but let me show you the home and road records for the Celtics in the Larry Bird years:

I mean … that’s utterly incredible. After Bird left, the Celtics’ home advantage dissipated — you just KNOW that Bird studied that crazy floor more than anyone — and when the team moved into the Fleet Center in 1995, the home advantage disappeared entirely.

“You know, an outside contractor offered to duplicate that floor for them exactly,” Riley said back then. “The Celtics wouldn’t let them. They didn’t want to lose that advantage.”

I think about that floor now because the NBA — and the NFL and NHL and Premier League for the most part too — generally works pretty hard to make sure that all their playing dimensions and surfaces are uniform. You know the famous Hoosiers line, where they find that the foul line is 15 feet away from the basket and that the rim is 10 feet high: “I think you'll find these are the exact same measurements as our gym back in Hickory.” The Celtics developed a loophole by playing on the same floor for all those years and learning all of that floor’s rhythms.

But you know what sport DOES let you mess around with dimensions and surfaces?

Right. Baseball.

And now the Kansas City Royals are trying to make their wonderful ballpark a weapon.

Baseball is very particular about its dimensions … in the infield. Sixty feet 6 inches, 90 feet between the bases; these are not only untouchable, they are sacrosanct, the holiest measurements in American sports.

As for the outfield?

Well, for the most part, you can do what you wanna do in the outfield.

Like so many things in baseball, this goes back to the very beginning. Back in the early days, they would play baseball wherever they could find a space. Fairgrounds. Commons. Parks. And when they started building actual baseball ballparks, they would make the park fit the space. In 1887, when the Philadelphia Phillies owner John Rogers decided to build a ballpark for $80,000 — his own money, believe it or not! — he bought a rectangular parcel of land on the corner of 15th and Huntington Streets. Because the land was a rectangle, the builders had no choice but to make the dimensions to the Baker Bowl bananas — 341 feet down the field line expanding to 408 feet in center and decreasing all the way down to 280 feet down the right field line.

This ballpark altered baseball history. The Phillies were rarely good in the 50 or so years they spent at the Baker Bowl — they reached just one World Series — but they often scored a lot of runs and even more often gave up a lot of runs. In 1933, Chuck Klein won the Triple Crown.*

He hit .467 with 20 homers and 81 RBI at home.

He hit .280 with 8 homers and 40 RBI on the road.

*Klein is the second-last National Leaguer to win the Triple Crown. Four years later, St. Louis’ Joe Medwick won it by hitting .374 with 31 homers and 154 RBI. The Baker Bowl played a role in his Triple Crown too — that year, Ducky hit .488 with three homers and 10 RBI at the Baker Bowl. back in Hickory.

Anyway, you know that Fenway Park is shaped the way it is because of the space where it was built. Wrigley Field is Wrigley Field because of where it was built. Yankee Stadium is Yankee Stadium because it was meant to mirror the old Yankee Stadium. Old Yankee Stadium had a short right field line (in large part to play to the pull-hitter power of Babe Ruth himself) and an enormous left field (in part because that’s what the land demanded).

In later years, MLB did put up a few guardrails — you now need the outfield corners to be at least 325 feet away and centerfield be at least 400 feet away — but beyond that, the outfield dimensions are left to the whims of the home team. A team could have a 600-foot fence in center field if it wanted. Nobody would want that because it would make the fan seats pretty brutal, but the point is you COULD.

Kansas City, as a city, has a long history of messing around with ballpark dimensions. This began with Charlie Finley, who at some point became entirely convinced that New York’s incredible success in the 1950s and early 1960s was mostly due to the dimensions of Yankee Stadium.

Don’t believe me? Here’s the quote:

“I am convinced the size and shape of Yankee Stadium is the answer to the great success of the Yankees,” he said.

See? He also said this:

“To me, getting caught playing baseball in Yankee Stadium is like getting caught in a craps game with loaded dice.”

I’ve done a little dive into how this bananas thought ended up in Finley’s head. He always said that he picked it up from former Yankees star Eddie Lopat, who managed the A’s in 1963, but Lopat denied it, and I tend to believe Lopat. My best guess is that Finley misunderstood something Lopat said and, as he often did, just went with his own version of reality.

Anyway, in 1964 — apparently against Eddie Lopat’s specific advice — Finley decided to make Kansas City’s Municipal Stadium into an exact replica of Yankee Stadium.

And boy was Finley excited!

“I feel that in revamping my ballpark to go along with the Yankees,” he said, “I will be, for the first time, able to compete with them on an equal basis.”

As I have written before, there were only three, mostly minor, problems with Finley’s plan to retrofit Memorial Stadium.

With few actual options, Finley decided to build a little fan pavilion in right, close to the field that he called “Pennant Porch.” The idea was that the front of the pavilion would mirror the exact right field distance of Yankee Stadium. When MLB said, um, nah, that still counts as building a wall too close, he threw a fit and changed it so that the wall was exactly 325 feet away. He called it “Half Pennant Porch.”

Finley also brought in the other walls.

He also picked up aging sluggers Rocky Colavito and Jim Gentile.

He also created a standing order for the public address announcer that whenever anyone hit a long fly ball that was not a home run at Memorial Stadium but WOULD have been a home run in New York, he had to announce: “That would have been a home run at Yankee Stadium.”*

*This ended on May 2, 1964, when the Twins’ Tony Oliva, Bob Allison, Jimmie Hall, and Harmon Killebrew hit four home runs in a row. Poor Eddie Lopat was fired a month later.

To be fair to Finley, the new ballpark dimensions did mean that the A’s hit with a lot more home run power. They hit just 95 home runs in 1963 and 166 dingers in 1964 (with Colvaito and Gentile contributing 62 homers).

To be fair to, you know, reality and logic, the new dimensions also led the A’s pitching staff to give up a major league record 220 home runs. The 132 home runs they gave up at home was a record for 36 years until the 2001 Rockies gave up 133 home runs at Coors Field.

In 1995, the Kansas City Royals — this was when the team was being run by the estate of the late Ewing Kauffman — decided to make a couple of changes to what was then called Royals Stadium. First, they would take out the artificial turf and put in natural grass. And second, they would move in the fences 10 feet all around.

“We wanted to give the fans more offense,” general manager Herk Robinson said.

Here is an actual sentence that appeared in the actual story announcing the change: “The pulled-in fences should be a boon to the Royals’ Bob Hamelin and Wally Joyner."

I don’t need to tell you that the pulled-in fences were not a boon to either Hamelin (who hit seven home runs in 1995 and was gone shortly after) or Joyner (who hit 12 home runs in 1995 and was gone shortly after). I don’t need to tell you that the pulled-in fences were an absolute disaster for the Royals, who only once finished with a winning record (and barely one at that — 83-70) in the nine years those dimensions lasted. Here are the home run totals at Kauffman Stadium for each of those seasons:

So, um, yeah, that wasn’t the wisest strategic move in the history of baseball.

In 2004, the Royals moved the fences back to their original location. And even though it wouldn’t be until 2017 that the Royals actually outhomered opponents in their home park, at least the home runs they allowed went down somewhat.

Last year, the Royals hit 70 homers at home and allowed 81.

On Tuesday, Royals general manager J.J. Picollo announced that the Royals are once again moving in their fences nine or ten feet (though keeping it at 410 feet in center) and also LOWERING the fences from 10 to 8½ feet in most places.

My man J.J. is convinced that this will help the Royals.

Unlike Kansas City dreamers of the past, though, he says they used data to make this decision.

“During the course of the season,” he told MLB.com, “we just started doing some research, running some numbers and trying to figure out how much this really impacts our offense. Consequently, how would it affect our pitching staff? Ultimately, we concluded that we would be a better team offensively. With our current pitching staff, the changes in the dimensions wouldn’t impact them negatively as much as it impacts our offense positively.”

I’ll be absolutely fascinated by how this plays out for a couple of reasons. One is: I have been a big believer for a long time that teams, especially teams with smaller payrolls, should absolutely try to make their home ballparks as big an advantage as possible. Baseball is a game that lets you do that, so teams should try to do that. If the NFL allowed teams to change the dimensions of the field, you know that a wide-open team like the Rams would make their field wider, and a ferocious defensive team like the Titans would make their field about the width of three Mazda Miatas.

I am convinced that the Pittsburgh Pirates, for example, should make PNC Park fit their style of play … whatever that is.

Two, though, is something that I’ve heard J.J. talk about before: He has believed for a long time that the big outfield at Kauffman Stadium has altered the way young players swing the bat. J.J. was instrumental in bringing in the young brigade of the early 2010s, and while that group certainly lived up to the hype — the team won back-to-back pennants and a World Series — his thought was that many of the young players that had a lot of natural power didn’t develop it, perhaps because they saw one too many long fly ball die at the warning track. Again, I’ll be interested to see if he’s right.

In the meantime … well, I don’t do fantasy sports here. But I’ll give you a freebie: You might want to get Bobby Witt Jr.