Remember 1969: The too-big Stadium Conundrum

 

Remember's Ramblings – Volume 2, Article 1

Jamuary 7, 2025

 

Bring in the fences?  OR  Cut the infield grass shorter? 

 

Mack's Mets regular readers are by now certainly familiar by one writer's call for the team to 'bring in the fences', or shorten the distance from home plate to the outfield wall in hopes that more of the deep fly ball outs hit by the Mets hitters become home runs instead of long outs.  

 

When digging under the rocks to see if this is a warranted action, there are a few interesting facts that showed in the numbers.  

The first one is that the Mets as a team hit more home runs in 2024 at Citi Field in 80 games than they did on the road in 82 games.  They played one home game 'on the road' in London England against the Phillies.   They also played one away game in London and didn't hit a home run in either one.   

By the numbers, in home vs away games:

Home Runs:        +5           (106 - 101)

Triples                  +1           (8 - 7)

Doubles                -7           (136 -143)

Singles                  -88         (384 - 472)

Bases on Balls    +70        (292 – 222)

Batting Avg         -.016      (.238 - .254)

OBP                      +.006     (.322 - .316)

Slugging               -.002      (.414 - .416)

OPS                       +.004     (.736 - .732)

SB %                     +.057     (.860 - .803)

Those are the raw numbers as copied from Baseball Reference.    What they mean is harder to define.   The two that stand out in my mind are the astounding 88 less singles and the impressive (?) 70 more walks.    For reference, they struck out 22 less times at home than on the road, but they also had 114 less plate appearances at Citi.  

Baseball reference has the tracking of ‘batted ball trajectory’, separating all batted balls by ground ball, fly ball, or line drive.  This data is only available as an entire year, not broken down by home/away or by ballpark.   It would be nice to see whether they were a better line-drive hitting team (their team BA on line-drives is .621) on the road than at home or whether more of the ground balls they hit in other parks got through the infield for base hits.   Unfortunately, that is undetermined by the data available.    

Also unfortunately, the pitching splits are not broken down the same way the batting splits are.  While there is a lot of detail pitching data, there is no cumulative team pitching data for home and away.   It could be gleaned from the game data, but that is another month’s work.  

More research is required (and would need to be done on a team by team basis) to find out how well opposing teams hit at Citi Field vs. their home park. 

It is interesting that the 2023 season mirrored 2024 in almost every category, with the home Mets outslugging the away Mets by 17 homers (116- 99), driving the OPS to be 14 point difference (.731 -.717).  

I wish I could explain the deltas here, but I cannot.   Perhaps it may be the height of the infield grass?  Does the ball get through faster in some of the other ballparks?   Is that a thing that the team has done to support the pitchers?   

Other than that, do the hitters approach at-bats differently in the bottom of an inning than they do at the top?    One would think there would be more singles fall in front of fielders in the bigger parks, but that is not true for Citi.    

In looking at Juan Soto data earlier, I found that he had outstanding career stats at Citi Field and heard somewhere (probably on one of the MLB.com clips) that Soto “sees the ball very well in New York”.  I have often wondered if the batter’s eye or outfield wall was negatively affecting hitters, but that sounds like it might not be the case. 

For reference, Washington’s Nationals Park was the park that the Mets liked the best in 2024 (and 2023).   While they played more games there than any other park except Miami (7 games each in MIA and WSH, 6 in ATL), the 13 homers and 15 doubles in Washington’s stadium was the only place they hit more than 9 of either.    Nationals Park was also the only away field they hit more than 1 triple with their (3) 3-baggers.     

Perhaps they got hot on their trips through Washington, but the same stats hold true in 2023 as well.  

To conclude, I cannot get on the train that the Mets should be pulling the fences in with this finding for the recent past, at least until the batting average and number of singles is explained. 

I will cut this off today, but would be willing to do some follow-up research of specific questions if you pose them in the comments.   Some of the things I will come back with next week are:   What do these stats look like for a couple other teams (Braves, Phillies?)  and What do these stats look like for a couple of players (Alonso, Nimmo, Lindor, Vientos?).

Also, please enter any theories you may have that explains any of these numbers. 

 

Remembers Reminiscing:   January 7 birthdays

                   

Craig Shipley (62), Jorge Toca (53) and Francisco Rodriguez (43) are celebrating birthdays today, while the late Carlos Diaz would have turned 67. 

Jorge Toca is one guy that I was rooting for and thought he would have a better career than he did.   I watched him have a pretty good year in Binghamton in 1999 and a decent start in AAA in 2000, and thought “this guy will be the next big power hitting first baseman of the New York Mets”    That never happened as he ended a short career with just 7 hits (1 double) in 27 at bats with no walks and 11 strikeouts.