The best-case scenario for a sports team owner is rare, but clear: A local businessman runs the team as a community institution. Rather than an absentee landlord, the owner should be a community leader. That’s the vision new Orioles owner David Rubenstein is selling. During the playoffs, rather than sequestering himself in a luxury box, Rubenstein sat in the stands, among the people. OK, he was right by the home dugout, so he was among the richest subset of the people, but it’s good optics.
And less than a year into his tenure, Rubenstein is showing himself to be a builder of bridges. Or a tearer-down of walls. Or a mover of walls, at any rate. One of baseball’s most foolishly conceived and widely derided architectural features is on its way out. Mike Elias, the Orioles’ executive vice president and general manager, announced Friday that the left field wall at Oriole Park at Camden Yards is getting a haircut and moving toward the plate.
Glory, glory, hallelujah.
Gimmicky outfield walls are one of the best things about baseball. Their origins stem from downtown ballparks, designed and built in the early 1900s on lots that weren’t quite big enough to suit the purpose. Fenway Park’s Green Monster is the most famous example, but they were everywhere. When MLB teams started building a new wave of baseball-only stadiums in the 1990s — a wave led by Camden Yards — the architects got to put away their protractors and French curves and get a little creative.
So we have high scoreboard walls in Houston and Pittsburgh, and funny angles in Philadelphia and San Francisco designed with the express purpose of generating triples and inside-the-park home runs. Just to name a few.
Since its earliest days, Oriole Park has always been hitter-friendly, but in 2021, things went a little too far. That year, the Orioles lost 110 games, while allowing a 5.85 staff ERA (worst in baseball by seven tenths of a run) and a league-leading 258 home runs. Now, the way I remembered things was that 30% of Gleyber Torres’ career home runs were cheap wallscrapers to left field during the nine games he played at Camden Yards that year, and that led directly to the wall getting moved back.
That’s not actually what happened. Torres only hit eight home runs at Camden Yards in the first two years of his career, and none at all in 2020 or 2021. And only half of those homers were to left or left center. So it’s not really his fault.
Either way, there are two ways to stop giving up a historically huge number of home runs. One is to fix the pitching staff, but that’s hard, man. Even three years and two postseason trips later, Elias has only kind of done that. Or you can move the wall back so it’s harder to hit home runs.
So before the 2022 season, the Orioles increased the height of the left field wall from seven feet to 13 feet. While keeping the left field foul pole 333 feet from the plate, they installed a sharp dogleg out to a long, flat section of fence that eliminated several rows of seats in left field. The left-center field marker went out an additional 20 feet, from 364 feet to 384 feet. And rather than blending the new left field alcove into the existing center field wall, the fence jutted out perpendicular to its previous direction, leaving a 90-degree corner in deep left center, 398 feet from the plate.
Now, this is not the first time the Orioles have monkeyed with the dimensions of their ballpark to reduce scoring. Before the 2001 season, they replaced the playing surface and draining system and took the opportunity to tinker with the dimensions by moving home plate back seven feet. (I imagine Peter Angelos standing on the pitcher’s mound, talking to a general contractor with a pencil behind his ear, going, “You know, since we’re doing all this anyway…” like Myrna Loy in Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House.)
That adjustment lasted all of one season, after which the plate was moved back to its original position and — I’m quoting here from MLB.com — “the entire field was shifted several degrees to the first base side.”
The idea of rotating an infield got me thinking. Rule 2.01 governs the playing field, specifying that the infield must be a 90-foot square, and that the distance from home plate to second base must be 127 feet, 3 3/8 inches. Now, I got excited for a moment, because Rule 2.01 and Rule 2.04 (which governs “The Pitcher’s Plate”) don’t say that the mound must line up with second base. But that’s cleared up in an illustration, Appendix 1, that lays out all of the measurements for a legal infield.
According to Appendix 1, the bases and the mound have to be symmetrical left-to-right, but it’s not clear to me that the grass design of the infield must also be symmetrical. I’ll quote from Rule 2.01: “The grass lines and dimensions shown on the diagrams are those used in many fields, but they are not mandatory and each Club shall determine the size and shape of the grassed and bare areas of its playing field.”
So is a checkerboard infield, with alternating squares of grass and dirt, legal? How about a series of stripes, or random curvilinear patterns?
I suspect we’ll never find out, because there’s no practical reason to build an asymmetrical infield other than idle sadism. More than that, I strongly suspect that any team that announces its intention to do so would get a phone call from the commissioner’s office about five minutes later, to the effect of, “Hey, don’t be a jackass.”
But it’s something to think about. At any rate, the Orioles didn’t make their infield into a rhombus in 2002. And if they had, it would’ve gone over better than the new outfield wall did in 2022.
The effects of the change were immediate and obvious. If you love jarringly severe angles — like the one being removed from the left field wall at Camden Yards this winter — you’re going to love this graph of HR/FB% on fly balls to left field over the past 10 seasons.
This period in time coincides with the swing plane revolution and the juiced ball era — to say nothing of wildly varying quality of play by the home team. Suffice it to say there is no end of confounding variables here. All that having been said: Can you tell when they moved the outfield wall back?
Baseball fans tolerate, or even embrace, a wide variety of park-induced offensive environments. We’re cool with changing the dimensions of a stadium, even if it’s done deliberately to manipulate the frequency of home runs. Architecture is all part of the game here.
But the 2022-24 Camden Yards wall… I’m sorry for being indelicate, but it just sucked. It was obvious and inorganic. The sharp angle at the bullpens made it look like some giant had just appeared one day with the world’s largest sabre saw and hacked a slice out of the left field grandstand. (Also, I might have just had this on my mind because Elias cut his teeth with the Astros, but the left field cutout in Baltimore has to be pretty close to a perfect fit for the Crawford Boxes in Minute Maid Park, right? You know how Brazil fits perfectly into West Africa like two puzzle pieces, because of Pangaea? Like that.)
Because Walltimore was so glaringly artificial, it was beyond obvious when a fly out or a double in 2022 would’ve been a home run the year before. After Elias revealed the redesign on Friday, Cespedes Family BBQ posted a clip of Trey Mancini doubling off the top of the left field concavity. On that ostensibly joyous occasion, Mancini looked (and announcer Melanie Newman sounded) like Christmas had been canceled. Which is not ideal, if you ask me. When the home team’s popular slugger hits a double, “bereft” is not the crowd reaction you’re really going for.
The new outfield fence represents a middle ground between the dinger-happy joke stadium of the pre-2022 era and the yawning maw of despair that replaced it the past three seasons. The hard left turn after the foul pole remains, but the fence will sit between 373 and 374 feet from home plate, rather than 384 as it is now. And the fence will be eight feet high, rather than 13, which brings home run robberies back into play.
About two-thirds of the way to the bullpen, there’ll be another kink — a 120-degree angle, this time — pulling the fence in to 363 feet at that corner and out to 376 feet at the edge of the bullpen. That brings the fence some 26 feet closer than it currently is in that power alley, with a fence that drops to six feet, 11 inches in height after the corner.
What’s this going to mean? Well, more home runs for right-handed power hitters, obviously. I’ve already seen a groundswell of hope that this change could be revolutionary for Ryan Mountcastle. The Orioles’ first baseman was a dead-pull hitter as a minor leaguer; now he sprays screaming line drives all over the place, but he underperforms his xSLG by 50 points every year because his new pull-avoidant approach has made him the opposite of Isaac Paredes.
As much as I’m thrilled by the return to (relative) normalcy for left field at Camden Yards, and as much as I would love to see Mountcastle relieved of the curse laid upon him by the gods of BABIP, I would caution against overstating the impact of this change until we see it in action.
How many more home runs will we see thanks to this field configuration? Well, it’s impossible to predict, because moving the fence and lowering it will change how pitchers, hitters, and defenses alike approach the game. And don’t sleep on the impact the lower fence will have both as a benefit to hitters and as a hunting ground for would-be home run robbers.
Still, let’s make an educated guess. For most of the length of this wall, the fence is being brought in from 384 feet to about 373 feet. Over the past three seasons, how many fly balls and line drives to left field at Camden Yards had a projected distance between 373 and 384 feet? Hundreds?
The answer, in 247 regular- and postseason games, is 48. That includes 35 fly outs, 11 doubles, one triple, and one single. And since I can already hear you wondering how you hit a 380-foot single, here’s a video.
Yes, that’s right, a 114 mph line drive by Giancarlo Stanton. Which is probably what William of Ockham would’ve guessed if they’d had baseball (or Giancarlo Stanton) in 14th-century England.
Anyway, while the wall is coming in and down, it’s not coming in and down by much. That average of 16 more home runs a year obviously doesn’t account for the more significant modification in left center, so we’ll probably get a few more dingers there. But there’s still going to be a 40-foot setback from the left field foul pole to the fence, and that’s going to swallow up a lot of balls that would’ve gotten out in a lot of other parks.
Here, have an example.
On July 14 of this year, Luke Weaver threw a fat changeup and Mountcastle crushed it. Play-by-play man Matt Vasgersian (this game was exclusive to Roku, God bless the balkanization of MLB broadcast rights, so no Kevin Brown on the call) was convinced it was out. “That one’s gonna go, big [left] field or not!”
Maybe Brown, with more experience in Camden Yards, would’ve known better. But in Vasgersian’s defense, Weaver also thought it was out. I just happened to pause the video while the Yankees reliever had the face and posture of a kindergartener who’d just been told to stop drawing on the walls in magic marker.
An appropriate reaction, as this ball would’ve been a home run in 25 out of the 30 major league parks, according to Statcast. But not Camden Yards. And not Camden Yards in 2025, either. This ball had an estimated distance of 365 feet, which is some eight feet short of where the new wall is going to be.
In short, I’m hopeful but not necessarily optimistic. The wall is going to play a little more in favor of the hitters and look a lot less ridiculous. But this is still going to be a pretty deep left field compared to the rest of the league. And that’s fine. Fans are OK with wonky ballpark dimensions stealing their joy; they just want the park to be less obvious about it.
