kansas city royals Sources told ESPN that they are moving the majority of their outfield fence inward by 10 feet, making a drastic change to the offensive atmosphere of a stadium notorious for home run hitting, which the team hopes will play in line with league average.
The decision, which the Royals are expected to announce as soon as Tuesday, comes after years of discussion by Kansas City’s front office about tampering with the dimensions and months after the organization hired its analytics department to find a happy middle ground between Kauffman Stadium’s fly ball dead zone and other stadiums where home runs rise at exorbitant rates.
Royals general manager JJ Piccolo told ESPN, “We want a neutral ballpark where if you hit the ball well, it should be a home run.” “As soon as they start feeling like they can’t get the ball out of the ballpark, they start changing their swing. I watched it for years and years, and I just felt like it was time to try to take it further and see if everything we felt for years was accurate.”
Sources said the Royals will keep center field at 410 feet, but they plan to shorten the fence starting at the power alley-oop from 389 feet to 379 feet. The fence will continue that way, 9 to 10 feet shorter, almost to the corners, where the 330-foot foul poles will remain. The height of the fence will also be reduced from 10 feet to eight and a half feet.
Kauffman has played a slightly more aggressive out of the park than average because the size of the outfield – which was second only to Coors Field – promoted more doubles and triples. However, the conspicuous suppression of home runs worried the Royals that hitters were consciously or subconsciously changing their approach on the road, and changing the dimensions of the 81 games played at Kauffman without turning it into a bandbox would help Kansas City’s efforts to build a perennial playoff contender.
“It’s not like we’re trying to launch our attack quickly,” Piccolo said. “The more neutral it is at home, we think the better success we’ll have overall.”
Kansas City has modified its fences in the past, raising them by 10 feet between 1995 and 2003 and being viewed as a slightly above average home run park. The Royals returned to the stadium’s original dimensions in 2004, and the past two decades have seen balls hit one after another on the warning track, leading Piccolo to finally approach owner John Sherman this spring and ask for permission to authorize a study on the effects of a potential modification.
Given the permission, Piccolo tasked Dr. Daniel Mack, the Royals’ vice president of research and development and an assistant GM, to consider all the factors and make a recommendation. Mack, who has a Ph.D. Is. in Computer Science and received a master’s degree with a concentration in Machine Learning, with the benefit of a much more robust data set than 10 years ago, which could also include detailed information on wind and temperature.
“We wanted to focus on how we could find dimensions that would create a more coherent approach for us as a team,” Mack said. “It’s one thing when you say, ‘Okay, well, Kauffman is so big, it’s great for pitchers, you can’t really bring in power hitters.’ “Can we find dimensions that make it possible that whether we’re at home or on the road, we don’t have to worry as much about spectrum?”
The project began in early May and began with Mack and Alan Kohler, a senior R&D analyst at Kauffman, applying a run value to each fly ball. The goal, Mack said, was to find a distance and height of the fence that would leave the stadium with approximately league-average run value on fly balls.
It was not easy to do this. Not only does Kauffman boast the fifth-highest elevation of any stadium in Major League Baseball, but its windy conditions – especially in the power alleys – cause the average fence to play about 5 feet taller than their listed distance. With four years of in-depth climate data, as well as batted-ball information, Mack and his team divided the stadium into left field, center field, and right field and evaluated each for potential improvements.
Over time, Mack came to believe that it would be counterproductive to move the entire fence structure inside. Ultimately they settled on a fence line that is almost perfectly symmetrical, keeps center field the same – Kauffman has a highly favored batter’s eye below his giant Crown Vision scoreboard – and would allow more home runs with shorter height.
Mack presented the findings to Piccolo and assistant GM Scott Sharp in mid-August, and they were compelling enough to move on from Sherman. In Piccolo’s suite during games, it became a running joke on gloved deep fly balls that someone in the room could say: “Next year he needs to be a homer.”
Now, with Sherman’s blessing, it will happen. And Kansas City is finally fielding a lineup with legitimate power hitters in addition to superstars bobby wit jr. and slugging the first baseman vinny pasquantinoRoyals’ two best prospects, outfielders jack caglianone and catcher carter jensenThere is massive raw power – the tendency to target players whose skill sets fit better into the old dimensions will no longer be necessary.
“I feel like it’s just chasing lightning,” Mack said. “I don’t think it’s smart in general. It’s certainly not smart for a small-market team that has to adapt to the personnel you can get.”
Although Kauffman’s days as a safe haven for pitchers are likely over, Mack said he doesn’t expect the new enclosures to have any impact on his ability to pitch effectively. That said, the change attempts to be fair — though the Royals are believed to believe that with the new run values on fly balls, they project to add 1½ wins annually in home games.
And if it helps salvador perez Get close to 400 home runs to strengthen his Hall of Fame case or put Witt into annual 40-home-run territory before the team’s lease at Kauffman expires in 2030 and they move to a new stadium, even better.
“You know, in the end, we can go, ‘You know what? We shouldn’t have done that,'” Piccolo said. “But I think it’s worth five years to give it a chance and see if we like how it plays out.”
