“Don’t extremely windy conditions negatively impact hitters?”
“Nah….how could they?”
Had you ever gone out as a kid or a teenager and hit baseballs into a stiff wind?
I still remember that - remember it being no fun at all.
Hitting the ball with the wind at your back? That was terrific.
Bud Harrelson turns into the Bambino.
But if you blasted a high fly into the wind on a particularly windy day, the wind would just stop it. Why? Because it is called wind RESISTANCE.
That’s what hitters in Brooklyn constantly experience, especially, I imagine, early in the season, when there is dead air and blustery, sometimes near gale force, conditions.
In 1981, when I trained for the marathon, I Live near Tanners Park in Amityville. I would run down there and the wind coming in was fierce in the winter. After doing it a handful of times, I stopped and picked the other roots.
I also got to do singing gigs at the Jones Beach bandshells on field three and field four on four different occasions.
On one occasion, it was so windy that the guy with the sound system had to use sandbags to hold the speaker stanchions down. Another time, the wind was really strong, but not like that. Then one other time it was a normal breeze and one time it was dead air. You never know what you’re gonna get down by the water. The differences can be extreme.
I put all that together and I come to one conclusion: that Park with his current dimensions has to really suck for the hitters. And the statistics over the years support that conclusion. Mets former slugger Ike Davis hit plenty of home runs with the Mets for a few brief years, including 32 in 2012.
But when he played in Brooklyn, as a left-handed hitter, he had exactly 0 home runs, in roughly 125 Brooklyn plate appearances.
He played for Team Israel in a WBC qualifying round game back in Cyclones Park in September 2016, towards the tail end of his career. An MLB article included this stunning statement:
"I can still barely hit it out," said Davis, standing on the field at MCU Stadium, home of the Mets' Class A affiliate Brooklyn Cyclones, and eying the right-field wall.
"Can you feel that wind?"
Yes, I can feel it, Ike. Great for flying kites, not for playing pro baseball.
In a publication known as the Brooklyn paper, I also saw the following quote from a 2025 article:
“It’s super hard to hit in this field,” said catcher Ronald Hernandez, who is a switch-hitter. “But we don’t think about it because we make a lot of preparation during the practice, and we try to bring our best effort every time. It’s hard when you hit the ball in the air and the winds kind of treat you.”
And…
“You’re not going up there looking for home runs,” said Carson Benge. You’re going up there looking for low-line drives, something you can hit hard. So I feel like that in my approach has stayed the exact same. If I get something up a little bit and it gets caught at 105, I’m completely okay with that.”
Lastly…
(Manager Gil Gomez said) “It is a pitchers’ ballpark. There’s no secret about it. But I feel like the more that we can put that out of their minds and just focus on hitting the ball hard regardless of the outcome, I think we should be in a good spot.”
A Baseball America article in January 2025 said this:
“High-A Brooklyn (Mets) and High-A Tri-City (Angels) have reputations as brutal hitters' parks, and…rugged conditions for lefthanded batters”.
WHICH LEADS ME TO A SIMPLE QUESTION:
Since ownership can modify field dimensions simply by moving fences closer, to make the field footprint smaller, why the heck isn’t that done?
Does the organization want to torment its prospects? Does the organization want to make it a daily dose of miserable for its prospects? Does the organization want to take its prospects away from their normal style of hitting, assuming that their initial style of hitting involves some normal ball lift that translates into home runs in normal parks?
If I were the owner, I would want to protect my prospects and see them not have to fight through adversity. I would move the fences in. A lot.
But, sadly, I am not the owner, and really have no say in the matter. It just pains me to see hitters struggle in a nasty hitting Park. There are parks right in that league that are very friendly hitters Parks and I’m sure they’d much rather be playing there.
OK. I know I’ve written about the fences before. I’m going to stop here. Have a good day.
P.S. Playing on the water is weird. I went to Smith’s Point Beach in Suffolk County with the missus this Thursday. The wind was extremely strong, all right - fierce - but from the north, not from the ocean. For baseball, it is just weird playing in high wind conditions.
IS BRYCE MONTES DE OCA REACHING THE END OF THE ROAD?
Everyone has that one freakishly talented guy that you hoped would somehow straighten out their performance flaws and become a star. Darryl Dawkins in the NBA was one such guy. The backboard buster turned into a pretty good NBA center, but was incessantly in foul trouble.
Of all the Mets prospect guys I’ve followed as a writer on this site over the last decade, big Bryce was my guy.
A very wild guy who could throw 103 miles an hour, and I still remember that one pitch that he threw that look like a sick Mason Miller slider, except it instead broke like a screw ball in the other direction. A total freak pitch. It literally looked like it broke about 2 feet. Maybe that’s why he’s had repeated arm problems. Too much torque, no finesse.
Now in another organization, he pitched against Brooklyn Friday night in relief. I noted in the box score that the Brooklyn scored 10 runs on just six hits. Which is unusual. So then I looked at the box score. Bryce pitched.
He retired a batter (by strikeout) and allowed no hits…but hit two batters and walked 4 more, allowing 6 runs.
Bryce is now 30, and was drafted in 2018 but did not pitch as a pro until 2021. Injured seriously and often, he has only thrown 106 pro innings, fanning 156 batters, walking 94, and hitting 18 dudes that likely were quaking in their boots and had gotten their wills notarized before facing him.
He could fool everyone and pull it all together, finally, at age 30. But this feels like an experiment that will never be anything but a failed experiment. However, until Bryce says it’s over, it’s not over.
Washington Nats Exec Sean Hudson Fired for Discrimination Vs. Former Mets Player
SAW THIS ON TWITTER:
Director of Community Relations Admits on Hidden Camera to Active Religious Discrimination Against Starting Pitcher Trevor Williams, Surveillance of Nationals Fans’ Google History, and Segregated LGBTQ+ Corporate Meetings to an O’Keefe Undercover Journalist “One of our pitchers, Trevor Williams. He’s super Christian-Catholic, all these tattoos that mean a lot.” “The Dodgers had a group… who were drag queens who sometimes dressed up as nuns.
“He [Trevor Williams] went on social media like… ‘This is my religion. You all are mocking it.’” “Because of that, we [Washington Nationals] don’t use him [Trevor Williams] on social [media].” “Like, when they're like, is a hot dog a sandwich? And like, the players come up, you know what I mean? Like, we [Nationals] don't ask him [Trevor Williams].” “If you ever come to a Nats game, there is someone on our team who is responsible for figuring out everything about you and assigning you into a bucket of people. If you’re accepting cookies, we’re getting a plethora of your Google history.”
- We live in strange times.
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