The fact that the NBA has such an extreme home advantage, frankly, pretty much kills the “field dimension” element. Of those sports, the NBA is the one where there is no difference at all in the nature of the playing area; everything about the court, backboards and net in San Antonio is the same as in Oklahoma City. In the NFL there are no dimensional differences, but there could be differences in playing surface and weather. The NHL does have some mild differences in rink dimensions and the way the boards play.
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For basically every one of us, professional baseball and the talent of actual major league players are light years away from our own experiences, and that applies even if there are people in this thread who were the best player on their high school team, and were admired by all of their friends as the guy who was really good at baseball. That’s how much of a step up the pros are from us
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This cannot be emphasized enough. There is no comparison between an MLB player and the kind of baseball anyone has played unless they played professional baseball. None. Major League players are unbelievably good, and the difference among them is very small. (I think I should throw in the point that the differences between MLB parks aren’t as great as people seem to think they are, either. Its not like the Green Monster is just 240 feet out there.)
Let me use a quick example; in “The Only Rule Is It Has To Work” a couple of sabermetricians take over an independent league team and try to build a winner by using pure data. (I won’t spoil it for you.) One of the things they discover, in examinaing their players, is fascinating; they’re all young guys and really good athletes, but all of them would be slow in the major leagues. Not some, all. The guys on their team who are fast, who in real life you’d be like “That guys is fast,” are very, very slow as compared to MLB players. You don’t notice this, though, when you watch a professional baseball game, because they’re all fast, and so they all look the same. So you see a guy like Carlos Santana or Kyle Schwarber, and you think, well, that guy is kinda slow. Sure, in MLB he is. But if you had him come screw around with your softball team you’d be blown away by Kyle Schwarber’s speed. Unless you happened to have a former high school sprinting champ on your team Kyle would be the fastest man on the field.
This applies to basically any area of skill; they are impossibly good as compared to the experience of most people and they are all very close to one another. A very sure handed outfielder makes over 99% of all plays; a very poor one will be around 98%. (I’m counting plays that are not credited as chances if successfully made.)
But if we bring this back to the issue - I mean, I’ve been a student of baseball pretty much my whole life and watched more MLB games than I can count. If you’re an MLB fan, ask yourself an honest question; how often do I see a visiting player fail to make a play because he was unfamiliar with the nature of the stadium, and that play made an impact to the outcome of the game? If I ask myself that, the answer, to be honest, is that I cannot remember a single incident of that happening. I am sure it has happened, because almost anything that can happen in a baseball game has, but it’s INCREDIBLY rare. I challenge anyone to go through the boxscores and recaps of their favourite team to find two examples of it happening in an entire season. To speed things up, you can eliminate all blowout games (one play can’t be said to affect a 14-2 ass-kicking) and then just take an honest look at the recap. You’ll find it’s astoundingly rare.
Effectively all ballgames are decided by plays that would not matter who the home team was. A perfectly placed slider on the outside corner cannot be hit effectively; a flat slider on the inner half is going to get crushed. All MLB infields play pretty much the same, and an excellent shortstop will get to a hard grounder in the hole and a poor one will not. Mookie Betts will catch many fly balls that most center fielders will not, no matter the park.
What is absolutely for sure is that at the MLB level you aren’t going to change the way you pitch based on the park. A pitcher cannot “pitch to the park” because the manner in which a pitcher pitches is not subject to any unnecessary room for error. An MLB pitcher is pitching at the absolute extreme of his own abilities at all times, maximizing his efforts on every pitch and every at bat, and if he falls off in effectiveness even a little bit, MLB hitters will crush him. Deviating from what works for a pitcher in an effort to “pitch to the park” is a ridiculous idea; a pitcher who pitches high in the zone cannot decide tomorrow to completely change his way of pitching to put the ball low in the zone so as to avoid fly balls. If you’re a fly ball pitcher you have to live with it if you’re visiting a homer-happy park.
