Mythbusters: Citi Field Kills Homeruns

by Eric Simon on Oct 19, 2009 12:01 PM EDT

This'll be a quick one. We don't actually know yet whether Citi Field will generally suppress homeruns, runs, hits, or inflate any or all of those things. Eighty-one games isn't enough to make any long-term assertions with any significant degree of certainty. Coming into the season we thought it might be death to homeruns, and to be sure there weren't a lot of homeruns hit there in its first season. The problem with just taking the total number of homeruns hit -- 130 -- and concluding that the park is no friend to power hitters is that it tells us little about how the park played relative to other parks. Of course, the paucity of Citi Field longballs has a lot to do with the fact that the Mets played there, and the 2009 Mets, as we well know, were a bad baseball team which was especially bad at hitting for power.

Rumor has it that Matt Holliday has already expressed interest in playing in New York, either for the Mets or the Yankees. No big surprise, as the New York teams can offer the biggest spotlight and, in most cases, the biggest paycheck. He also has some trepidation about playing -- really, hitting -- in Citi Field, which is understandable given how much the media seems to have hammered home the points that Citi Field hates homeruns and that the dimensions should be altered accordingly. So for Holliday -- and anyone else repelled by the dimensions of the Mets' home park -- I whipped up this simple chart to illustrate, at least as far as we know right now, that Citi Field is clearly not harder to hit homeruns out of than the average park. On the contrary: Citi Field was 12th in 2009 homerun park factor at 1.057 (i.e. 5.7% more homeruns were hit in Mets games at Citi Field than on the road).

There are plenty of good reasons not to sign with the Mets, but their home ballpark shouldn't be one of them.

Tweet Comment 12 comments | 0 recs |

Do you like this story?

Comments

It seems like people are confused between the claims

“CitiField suppresses homers” and “CitiField suppressed David Wright’s home runs”. He was the only significant glaring example of a power deviation from career norms, and just anecdotally, its reasonable to see why, since may of Wright’s home runs in previous years went from somewhere around the middle of the field or beyond the gap in RCF, which is exactly where CitiField is significantly deeper than its predecessor. There are lots of examples of players with varying levels of baseline power who, albiet in small sample sizes for various reasons, saw no significant change in home run rate (Angel Pagan, Daniel Murphy, Gary Sheffield) or even an improvement (Jeff Francoeur).

"All energy flows according to the whims of the great magnet

What a fool I was to defy him"

-HST

by Mark Himmelstein on Oct 19, 2009 12:13 PM EDT reply actions

I think Citi really did cut down his HRs.

David is basically a pull homerun hitter, but also hits them to RCF area. Those are the areas with the highest walls and the farthest distance from home plate, respectively. HitFX data would be awesome here.

"I dunno. I never smoked any Astroturf"
-Tug McGraw

by squid92 on Oct 19, 2009 6:57 PM EDT up reply actions

How about this

compare to

This is just HR data so I dunno how conclusive it is. (Sorry ’bout the size)

by Jsz on Oct 19, 2009 8:39 PM EDT up reply actions

wasn't clear

first graph is 2008, but second is 2009

by Jsz on Oct 19, 2009 8:40 PM EDT up reply actions

Is that just Dubs?

Is there one for 2007 too? Pretty sure he lead at least the NL in Oppos that year, but I might be wrong.

"All energy flows according to the whims of the great magnet

What a fool I was to defy him"

-HST

by Mark Himmelstein on Oct 19, 2009 8:47 PM EDT up reply actions

Just david

2007:

2006

by Jsz on Oct 19, 2009 10:14 PM EDT up reply actions

From this, it would appear that he's really suffering in two areas.

Homeruns to true left field (i.e. not down the line, but a bit left of left-center), and anything right of center field.

"I dunno. I never smoked any Astroturf"
-Tug McGraw

by squid92 on Oct 19, 2009 9:34 PM EDT up reply actions

but for all we know, one or both of those are approach related

"I dunno. I never smoked any Astroturf"
-Tug McGraw

by squid92 on Oct 19, 2009 9:35 PM EDT up reply actions

I still think

they should lower the fences. No matter what the numbers are, a hitter isn’t going to be happy if he crushes a ball that hits the top of an unusually high fence. Lowering it won’t turn Citi into Yankee Stadium (sour grapes: A-Rod’s homer, an out at Citi, or a double?) but it would at least change the perception a bit. Plus, I don’t like that there can’t be any Endy-like plays, which IMO is one of the most exiting plays in the game.

by Mount17 on Oct 19, 2009 12:15 PM EDT reply actions

definitely an out

Bobby friggin Abreu was right there – an adequate right fielder would have been camped under that ball for about a month.

Still, glad to see ARod doing well – it makes Yankee fans look like such hypocritical female hygienic products now that they’re falling over themselves to love him.

"[The Giants] beat us down. We were beat by a grown-man team, a team we want to be like one day. They came in here and took it to us. Out-manned us, out-gunned us. ... It wasn't even close." - Raheem Morris, 9/27/09

by cjmulrain on Oct 19, 2009 1:06 PM EDT up reply actions

Meddler is right

Gap power gets suppresed at Citi, Pull power doesn’t get quashed as much. I like that Citi calls for better OF defesne and helps speeders with triples. It plays like a very exciting park, provided that we they can get our talent to play on it.

by Coolpapabell on Oct 19, 2009 12:49 PM EDT reply actions