Yankee Stadium's Big Home Run Problem

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Yankee Stadium’s Big Home Run Problem

Filed on April 20th, 2009 in Baseball ⋅ ⋅

What do you do if you spend $1.5 billion for your new baseball stadium, and after just three games you realize that you built it wrong?

This is the problem that could be facing the New York Yankees, as their “replica” of the old Yankee Stadium is playing nothing like it. Through three games, it seems that every ball hit in the air to right field goes over the wall — especially if you hit it wearing a Cleveland Indians uniform.

But while some have suggested that it is the slightly shorter fences in right, and some have suggested that perhaps baseball is juicing the balls again, there is a third argument that is quite intriguing, that the Yankees accidentally created a wind tunnel to right field by angling the seats the way they did. Perhaps it’s all three.

Sure the season is young, but this is a pretty alarming issue for the Bombers. Just how bad is it?

From ESPN’s Buster Olney:

There have been five games played in new Yankee Stadium, including two exhibitions against the Chicago Cubs, and so far there have been 25 homers — including 17 in the first three games in the Yankees’ first home series against the Indians.

That’s an average of five home runs per game and, at this pace, there would be about 400 homers hit in the park this year — or an increase of about 250 percent. In the last year of old Yankee Stadium, in 2008, there were a total of 160 homers.

So if the walls are just a little bit shorter in certain parts of the field, why is the ball going out at such a high rate?

According to Greg Rybarczyk of the Web site Hit Tracker, the balls being juiced is a legitimate possibility.

“So, very early this season (actually on the second full day of games), I had already noticed that balls were seemingly flying farther than they usually do, so I checked my numbers, and noticed that the standard distances of all the home runs around MLB were a lot longer than those hit in 2008. Since then, I’ve continues tracking this, and what was little more than a feeling and some numbers off a very small sample size have become a lot more compelling: the first 350 home runs this year are flying, on average, about 6 feet farther than last year.”

While I wouldn’t put anything past the folks at MLB when it comes to increasing interest and attention paid to the game, I’m not buying that juiced balls would have this big of an impact at Yankee Stadium, but be barely noticeable elsewhere.

The argument that makes the most sense to me is the one from the good people at accuweather.com, via CNBC.com, who think that the angles of the seats in the new stadium are basically creating a wind situation that sends everything up and out to right field.

Their argument:

“The old Yankee Stadium had more stacked tiers and a large upper deck, acting like a solid wall in effect, which would cause the wind to swirl more and be less concentrated. The new Yankee Stadium’s tiers are less stacked, making a less sharp slope from the top of the stadium to the field. This shape could enable winds to blow across the field with less restriction. In addition, the slope of the seating would also lead to a ‘downslope’ effect in the field which, depending on the wind direction, would tend to cause air to lift up in the right field. Fly balls going into right field during a gusty west wind would be given more of a lift, thus carrying the ball further out to right field.”

Accuweather also said that the only times that this would be an issue would be if the wind was blowing from a westerly direction and blowing at over 10 mph, particularly in the spring and mid to late fall.

No matter what the cause, the Yankees have a big problem on their hands. They still have another 77 games to play at this stadium this year, and probably another 80 years of games after that. They can’t make any changes for this season, but you can bet that things will be different in 2009.

Perhaps it will be as simple as an addition somewhere to the facility that helps redirect or block the wind, or maybe it will be as drastic as having to remove seats to move the fences back.

Either way, the first four games at the new Yankee Stadium could not have gone much worse for the Yanks.

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