Apparently tired of allowing the most runs in baseball just about every single season, the Colorado Rockies are raising the Coors Field outfield walls in hopes of keeping a few more balls in the yard.
It may mean the biggest change to how baseball is played at altitude since a humidor was installed at Colorado in 2002.
“The goal is to raise the wall heights to make it potentially more playable and more fair — for pitchers,” Rockies general manager Jeff Bridich said. “We really don’t know, excactly, the effect it is going to have. We are going to live it together, this year, and see what happens.”
Before the 2016 season begins next month, the Rockies will add eight feet of height to Coors Field’s right-center-field wall and five feet to the fence in left field.
Via PurpleRow.com, here’s the before and after:
Basically throughout their entire existence, the Rockies have been fighting to neutralize Denver’s high altitude and produce a brand of baseball that mirrors the game played in every other stadium. When Coors Field was built in 1995, it included the deepest fences in the game, and when that didn’t adequately suppress home runs the team installed a humidor in 2002. That helped somewhat, but Coors Field has remained the game’s most hitter-friendly park.
Though the heightened walls certainly won’t turn Coors Field into the Polo Grounds (or even Petco Park), the approach to them sounds kind of scientific, which is somewhat reassuring.
From the Denver Post:
The Rockies, Bridich said, determined that right-center field and down the left field line were high-home run areas. They used a formula that accounts for the launch angle and exit velocity of hits off the bat to figure out how to lessen easy homers.
By that measure, total home runs at Coors Field could fall by 5-6 percent.
“We had two decades worth of knowing this ballpark,” Bridich said. “There have been a lot of ideas thrown out over time about what should be done, if anything. One of the nice things now is that with all of the advancements in technology, there is a lot of data and data sets that we can point to.”
Fewer home runs mean less anomalously high-scoring games, which would be good for a league that has to watch a Rockie win the batting title every other year while Colorado pitchers’ ERAs balloon above 5.00. Even if Carlos Gonzalez fantasy owners might not be happy.
