ok, so it’s not about to fall down obviously. Are there plumbing and electrical problems? I’ve seen nothing which would indicate this.
Yeah. Nothing disasterous, but the kind of problems you’d expect from a 90 year-old facility that had on-again-off-again maintenance. My sister and brother-in-law live in Groton and they’re almost as into baseball as I am.
BIL has been following the rennovation packages and “new stadium/no new stadium” debates for years.
Now I’ve got a question about the Polo Grounds. I was always under the impression that they had been built for something else, like polo, and just happened to be the only venue available for the Giants. On the other hand, Robot Arm’s posts seem to imply that it was purposefully built for baseball. What’s the deal?
I saw him on C-SPAN and somebody asked him if he’d ever consider being MLB commissioner. He said something along the lines of he loves the game too much to make it his job.
[hijack]He also said how his kids finally considered him a success when he was mentioned on a Seinfeld episode. I thought that was funny. (Kramer says, “You know how’s a good looking man? George Will.”)]/hijack]
Sorry, I’m a big Goerge Will fan…I’ll shut my yapper now.
Jeff
There were several stadiums called “The Polo Grounds”. The one that most of us are familiar with just carried on the name from the first one, where, polo was indeed played, but only rarely.
The stadium got its shape because of the city block it was placed in.
The vagaries of urban layouts often dictated the shape of baseball stadiums.
Now if a stadium is an odd shape, it’s a choice by the architect, not because there is no other option.
Basic structure: Probably OK; the masonry has no apparent cracks.
Plumbing: Ever been in a men’s room there? Can you form a mental image of sheet-metal troughs?
Seating: The nub of it, and not just quantity, not with the highest average ticket price in the majors, either. No, the seats were built for 1912-size butts, out of hard wood at that. People of above-average height bump their knees continuously. Too, despite the park’s small size, most of the seats have bad views - literally about half of them face the right fielder. If you’re down in the corner, you have to sit sideways to see anything. That problem is really not fixable, either.
The place has been modified very frequently since Yawkey bought the club. This year, there are seats on top of the Wall, replacing that ugly old net, and the back wall behind the center field bleachers has actually been removed to prevent the new seats from further deadening the air. That became an issue with the luxury boxes (now the .406 Club) that blocked winds from the west and south and reduced batted balls’ carry.
Moving the Wall back would require closing Lansdowne Street, perhaps requiring the nightclubs across it to be closed (they’re lucrative and the owner has a lot of political pull, btw). Conventional wisdom is that it turns high fly ball outs into homers, but it also turns line-drive homers into doubles, so it balances out - the number of homers per year at Fenway isn’t dramatically different from other parks’ totals. Watch enough Sox games and that becomes clear.
There’s also common speculation that a large part of Red Sox ticket sales are baseball tourists who want to “experience” Fenway before it’s gone, and that locals who haven’t been to many other parks don’t realize it’s a dump. Put something like Camden Yards on the waterfront, between the courthouse and the convention center, and not many will miss Fenway.
I don’t see the lights going out or the plumbing backing up. Again, is there any verifiable evidence that there are plumbiung or electrical problems at fenway park?
I think you’re grossly underestimating the importance of free agency to baseball. The top lefty sluggers will at the very least condiser the Giants for decades to come if not outright choose them because of the short porch in right.
While it was done for Barry Bonds now you’re kidding yourself if you don’t believe the right field fence will have no impact on the Giants long after Barry has hung up his spikes.
Of course, the right field wall could not be any further back than it is without making it float.
Pacific Bell Park is a terrible home run park, and it REDUCES the number of homers Bonds hits. He hits more homers on the road than at home. Look it up. Any player who chooses to sign with the Giants thinking it means easy homers is in for a big surprise; it will hurt their numbers. And it would appear lefthanded sluggers aren’t flocking to San Francisco anyway. You’d think Jim Thome would have wanted to play there if it would boost his homer totals.
Had Bonds played in almost any other park these past few years, he would have hit more homers, not fewer.
To answer the OP:
The reason baseball home run fences are nto standardized is that in the early days of baseball, the distance from home plate to the fence was not considered a meaningful or important measurement. When the modern rules were created and re-created from circa 1845 up to 1900, the standardization in the rules naturally centred around the dimensions that REALLY affect the game - the bases, home plate, the pitcher’s mound, and the strike zone. “Ballparks” back then quite often did not have outfield fences at all.
The distance to the fences didn’t really start to become an important issue unil 1920, and by then changing the rules would have made some existing parks illegal.
There is no particular drive to impose a rule now simply because it doesn’t matter much. Fence distance doesn’t really make that much of a difference; the key factors in homer frequency are altitude and visibility. If some park was built with a fence distance that made a travesty of the game… twenty feet behind second base or some such thing - I am sure they would not allow it.
During the last years of Cinergy (Riverfront) in Cincinnati, the Reds had to put up a special 40’ high fence in CF as the old one had to be removed to build the new stadium. Originally, the Reds planned to use a normal sized fence, but the Commissioner’s Office insisted on a higher fence because the CF distance would have been too short.
The LA Coliseum, home of the Dodgers when they went west, was only 250 feet down the LF line to a 42 foot wall, sez http://www.ballparks.com (check out the pictures there - it was bizarre). Fenway’s wall is shorter (37 feet) and farther (310 feet, almost normal).
In 1960, Paul Zimmerman, who later became the sports editor for the Los Angeles Times, wrote a book titled The Los Angeles Dodgers. He told about a game between the Dodgers and the Milwaukee Braves in 1959, in which Braves slugger Joe Adcock hit a ball into the left-field screen in the Coliseum, 251 feet away from home plate. The umpires ruled it a ground-rule double. Adcock was left on base that inning. The game was 5-5 after nine innings; the Dodgers won, 8-7, in extra innings.
At the end of the season the Dodgers and the Braves were tied with 86 wins and 68 losses each. The Dodgers won both games of a two-out-of-three playoff. Who knows what difference the ball hit by Adcock might have made elsewhere?
Incidentally, fabled Negro League pitcher Satchel Paige, on his first visit to Fenway Park, said, “Huuuueeeee! This place is a pitchers’ cemetery.”
I have mentioned in previous posts that, while many fans and sportswriters have castigated Walter O’Malley for moving the Dodgers from Ebbets Field (cf. the DiMaggio quote, above) into a football stadium, nobody makes a peep about John T. Brush and Charles Stoneham having the Giants (and the Yankees, from 1913 through 1922) play in the Polo Grounds, whose dimensions were just as outlandish. (In the 1951 playoff, Bobby Thomson hit a pitch about 280 feet, to clear the left-field stands; in the 1954 World Series, Indians slugger Vic Wertz hit a long fly that Willie Mays caught at the base of the centerfield wall, 480 feet from the plate. In the same park Thomspon got his fabled home run in.
I have always found the distance cited for Mays’ catch (480’) to be a bit generous.
Mays did not catch the ball in dead center. He was to the right of centerfield. He also did not catch the ball at the wall. He caught the ball several strides short of the wall.
I’ve seen more reliable estimates of Mays’ catch in 1954 as being around 400’-410’, which is still quite a bit of distance to cover.
It appears to me in the tape of Mays’s catch that he was facing the dead centerfield wall, and was probably 30-40 feet short of it, which would make it a 440 foot catch. I think he was further back than you’re giving him credit for.
Of course, I always thought Devon White’s catch in the 1992 World Series was every bit as good.
Pac Bell Park was actually privately funded. So while it was practically custom built for Bonds, the people of San Francisco were not screwed over.
Actually, in the early 90s (91, I think), and possibly still today, Fenway had the tallest (37ft in left), shortest (3ft, in right), closest (302ft, in right) and third deepest (420, in center) fences in the big leagues. The only one that has been challenged, AFAIK, is the third deepest. All the rest are still the extremes.
Ahem: Cleveland Municipal Stadium, built in 1930-31, demolished in 1996. May she rest in peace.
The CMS wasn’t boring for visiting batters; it was a pain. A 463-foot centerfield wall?!
quote:
Originally posted by Hari Seldon
Until about 1960 and with the sole exception of Yankee Stadium, built in the early 20s, all the major league parks were built in the years from about 1905-1915 and they were all built inside city blocks.
Lizaard:
Ahem: Cleveland Municipal Stadium, built in 1930-31, demolished in 1996. May she rest in peace.
The CMS wasn’t boring for visiting batters; it was a pain. A 463-foot centerfield wall?!
Cleveland Stadium wasn’t major league park built between 1920 and 1960. Milwaukee County Stadium was built in the early 1950s and starting in 1953 housed the Braves when they moved from Boston, and Baltimore Memorial Stadium opened in 1950 and housed minor league ball until the Browns moved from St. Louis in 1954. County Stadium was built out in the country and not within a city block though. I don’t know about Memorial Stadium surroundings though. It was in a residential area when I first started paying attention to baseball in the 1960s, but which came first, the residences or the ballpark, I can’t answer.
I think you mean it was 643 feet to the center field wall. Or else that would have been one hell of a wall.
And I goofed too.
It was 463 feet to the center field wall. Which was likely not 463 feet high.
Unless someone built the Great Wall of Cleveland.
The wind blows strongly out to left field, so balls hit to right field get knocked down and pushed toward centerfield. It’s far easier to hit home runs out to left field, even though the fence is much farther back. I don’t know if the Giants knew the wind would have this effect when they built the park, though.