{"id":417631,"date":"2026-01-18T16:07:07","date_gmt":"2026-01-18T16:07:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/417631\/"},"modified":"2026-01-18T16:07:07","modified_gmt":"2026-01-18T16:07:07","slug":"more-mlb-teams-should-change-their-outfield-wall-layout","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/417631\/","title":{"rendered":"More MLB Teams Should Change Their Outfield Wall Layout"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tThis week\u2019s Club Sportico<\/a><\/a>\u00a0essay focuses on a recent announcement by the Kansas City Royals<\/a>, who revealed a potential competitive advantage that\u2019s largely untapped across Major League Baseball.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Royals on Tuesday announced a new change that the club believes will result in an extra 1.5 wins next season. It wasn\u2019t a free agent signing, a new manager or a new piece of equipment (remember torpedo bats?). Instead it was a shift in engineering. The club is moving in the outfield walls<\/a> at Kauffman Stadium and lowering the fences by 18\u201d in most places.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn their explanation of the change, Royals executives showed just how much detail went into the planning. Kauffman Stadium is notoriously unfriendly to home run hitters\u2014a product of its cavernous outfield and prevailing wind patterns\u2014and the team recently deputized assistant GM Daniel Mack to study what an adjustment might look like.<\/p>\n

\n\tMack assigned a run value to every fly ball hit in Kauffman, then layered on the team\u2019s current roster of hitters and pitchers, its opponents, the wind patterns and even the stadium\u2019s altitude. He then played with distances and fence heights that would not only play around the league average, but also give this current Royals team a statistical advantage.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe result is a layout the team thinks will benefit its hitters\u2014including generational star shortstop Bobby Witt Jr.<\/a>\u2014a lot more than it will harm its pitchers, who had among the lowest fly ball rates of any staff in the majors last season. Welcome to the \u201cMoneywall Era.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIs this a new trend coming for MLB<\/a> parks across the U.S.? That\u2019s explored in the back half of the essay<\/a>. Here is an excerpt\u00a0\u270d\ufe0f:<\/p>\n

\n\tSo what\u2019s to stop a team from looking at its roster every offseason and making tweaks to its fences? Or more dramatically, what\u2019s to stop a team from putting its outfield wall on tracks and moving it based on who\u2019s in town, which way the wind is blowing, or who\u2019s starting on the mound?<\/p>\n

\n\tThe answer,\u00a0technically, is nothing (!). MLB\u2019s\u00a0191-page rule book<\/a>\u00a0is light on guidelines for the dimensions of the outfield. The centerfield wall must be at least 400 feet from the plate, and the rest of the outfield wall must be at least 325 feet. That\u2019s for venues built after 1958, which allows stadiums like Fenway Park to get away with its 302-foot right field fence.<\/p>\n

\n\tAccording to someone familiar with the broader league bylaws, MLB has no limit on the number of times you can make changes (more on that later). That said, there are a few reasons you might not see a rush of alterations at ballparks across America. The biggest one\u2014of course\u2014involves money. Construction isn\u2019t cheap, of course, but neither are the tickets that sit right up against the outfield walls.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn addition to helping the team on the field, the Royals\u2019 move will add about 230 seats in Kaufman\u2019s left and right field seating areas. If we assume for a moment that those tickets cost $80 each, that\u2019s an additional $1.5 million in sales annually for the team (before accounting for the extra beer volume). For reference, Royals revenue in 2024 was\u00a0$320 million<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n\tIf there\u2019s any team for whom cost would be irrelevant, it\u2019s the Mets.\u00a0And billionaire owner Steve Cohen moved Citi Field\u2019s fences in three years ago, but that move wasn\u2019t about on-field play. It allowed the team to build out a\u00a0new club area<\/a>\u00a0with living room-style seats and personal TVs.<\/p>\n

\n\t____________________________________________________
You can read and subscribe to\u00a0Club Sportico, our casual Substack newsletter,\u00a0here<\/a>. Sportico\u00a0subscribers have free access to\u00a0Club Sportico.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This week\u2019s Club Sportico\u00a0essay focuses on a recent announcement by the Kansas City Royals, who revealed a potential…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":417632,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[435],"tags":[488,49,48,175407,474,462,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-417631","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mlb","8":"tag-bobby-witt-jr","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-canada","11":"tag-club-sportico","12":"tag-kansas-city-royals","13":"tag-mlb","14":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/417631","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=417631"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/417631\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/417632"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=417631"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=417631"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=417631"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}