Ballparks of the Major Leagues

Via Bats Blog at the New York Times, flipflopflyball.com, by graphic designer Craig Robinson, has a bunch of infographics about baseball. Some of them are definitely maps. Some of them, like the following, are arguably maps:



The stadia of the major leagues. I don't know if these are to scale; it looks like they might be. But here's one thing I would like to see, have looked for, and cannot find: major league ballpark dimensions overlaid on each other at scale, so you could make direct comparisons. Maybe Mr. Robinson would be interested in such a project...

By the way, Robinson is also responsible for Atlas, Schmatlas, which I have a feeling many of you might appreciate.

More Homers Will Be Hit at New Yankee Stadium

The New York Yankees organization is, by its nature, arrogant and duplicitous. So it should come as no surprise that their claims that the new Yankee Stadium has the same dimensions as the old Yankee Stadium turn out to be false. So says Greg Rybarczyk, of the Hit Tracker website, as documented at Was Watching:



The old Yankee Stadium outfield wall is in red; the new one is in blue. Says Rybarczyk:

I created this by using actual prints from the new stadium, and by using high resolution satellite photos for the old stadium. You may have heard that the dimensions at the new park are the same as the old park, but that is not strictly true. In certain spots the distances are the same or similar, but there are significant differences in the fence line. As you can see in the diagram, most of right field is shorter in the new park, by as much as 9 feet, but more typically by 4-5 feet (the blue dotted lines in the corners are scale markings that are 4 feet apart.) In center field, the new park is actually a bit deeper, and in left field, the parks are very similar. From some analysis I’ve done on home runs, these differences would tend to increase home runs overall, and particularly in middle-to-lower power hitters.

The fence distances are not the only difference: in a few places, the fence is shorter (particularly the right field corner). A typical conversion factor for fence height to distance is that lowering a fence by 1 foot is roughly equal to moving it 0.84 feet closer to home plate. So, with the right field fence being a couple feet shorter in the new park, this is like moving it in a foot and a half or so.

Note that right field is closer to home plate to begin with, and already had the most homers hit to that part of the field in the old stadium; so moving that wall in closer will surely cause a greater marginal increase on homers hit there than the decrease in homers caused by the left-center wall being moved farther out, where many a fly ball will continue to go to die. And indeed, according to the New York Times, the new Yankee Stadium has seen the most homers per game in the majors so far this season (in an admittedly small sample size of four games).

Looks like good news for lefty sluggers and bad news for the Yankees pitching staff.

The Baseball Map of America

The long darkness known as the baseball off-season is finally over. In cartographic celebration of this sporting Eostre, here is the map of the countries of baseball in North America:



Thirty teams, thirty countries, one evil empire.