The players are still getting used to it too. When Church hit his long double off the wall this week, he posed for a homerun but then started busting it.

Thanks for linking.

I TOLD you, at the beginning of this year, that Utley would have a field day with that right field corner!!! The dimensions must have been designed by a Philly fan.

But the dimensions of the ballpark have begun to bother me more as the season’s progressed. That 16-foot wall in LF is annoying. I like the fact that it’s deeper, but it really penalizes liners/fliners hit by right handed hitters. I don’t care if fly balls die on the warning track, but when bullets are smacking high off the wall and played in quickly by the left fielder, that’s overkill.

From an aesthetic standpoint, the outfield is a mess. The height of the left field wall highlights just how ugly the wall color, soot, is. In right field, the chicken wire bullpen looks low rent (and it’s dangerous!) and the canopies overhead sully the look of ballpark even more. The adjacent Mo’s Zone conspires to make the pens look even crappier because it forces the aforementioned chicken wire fence to jut out.

The Mets would do well to lower all of the fences, remove the chicken wire, pull the Mo’s Zone in to make it flush with the remainder of the outfield and lose the freaking canopies! I do foresee a problem, however, in lowering the fence in left field: there are two doors in left field, approximately as high as the wall, that lead to a loading area underneath the stands. They can remove the top section of padding and paint a line across the remaining section of padding, but the trade-off would be a bunch of home runs that bounce off the bare wall and on to the field of play. There’s something unnerving about those kinds of home runs. A lot of home runs in the left and right field corners at Shea were like that, but this is one third of the entire outfield!

I do think the ball travels quite a bit better at Citi than at Shea. The problem is, the area where it seems to make the biggest difference is down the lines, where HRs are possible anyway. In the alleys the ball still seems to get knocked down. It seems to carry to CF pretty well, but with the wall height and depth of the outfield there, its very difficult to hit em’ out there anyway.

The Mets have still both hit more and allowed more homers at home than on the road, which is still as stunning as it was a month ago. Hit 26 at home and 20 on the road, allowed 34 at home and 31 on the road.

Of the 7 would-be HR’s that turned in to fly-outs, all were hit by opponents. All of ours at least were hits.

Mike Pelfrey NYM 6/10 3 Cole Hamels PHI Double Base of LF wall