How far must a ball travel to be a home run? Depends on the MLB stadium.
Baseball is a game of inches.
Unless we’re talking about the outfield fences.
In a typical major league ballpark, center field stands 400 feet from home plate. But for a home run in Detroit, you’ll have to hit the ball 22 feet farther. In San Francisco a measly 305-footer down the right field line could be a home run. These stadium quirks are beloved. They’re called charm.
How far is a home run, in …
The charm affects outcomes of games, of course. More than 1,000 batted balls this year resulted in outs that would have been a home run in a different ballpark, according to Baseball Savant. Those coulda-beens would have pushed this year’s home run total from 3,535 to 4,546, as of July 25.
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Baseball Savant uses the ball trajectory, field dimensions and environmental characteristics like air temperature to calculate in which parks a ball would have been a home run. Those calculations are rolled up into expected home runs. A ball that would have been a home run in half of all ballparks is worth 0.5 expected home runs.
By this measure, the Tampa Bay Rays are the biggest winner, having hit 19 more home runs than expected because of favorable stadium factors. Their top two home run hitters, Jose Siri and Isaac Parades, have squeezed out a combined eight extra homers, often by pulling the ball over the short left field at Tropicana Field.
On the other end are the poor, poor Kansas City Royals, who’ve been robbed of 18 homers. Their left fielder Edward Olivares is the unluckiest player in MLB, with just six home runs but 11.4 expected. Last month he hit a ball 421 feet at Tropicana Field, but was unfortunate enough to do it in one of six stadiums that could keep it in play.
The Angels’ superstar Shohei Ohtani leads MLB with 36 home runs so far — 3.5 more than expected because of favorable stadium factors. Ohtani will be a free agent after this season and could be headed to a new team and ballpark. If he played every game in San Francisco, he would only have 25 home runs. Shohei, if you’re listening, don’t go to the Giants.
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The player most helped by park factors is Atlanta’s Eddie Rosario, who has hit five more homers than expected, for a total of 15. The left-handed batter has hit most of his home runs to right field, where his home stadium of Truist Park has one of the shorter distances down the line at 325 feet.
No stadium is quirkier than Fenway Park, home of the Boston Red Sox. Boxed in by a tight street grid in left field, the fence is just 310 feet from home plate. To counter a deluge of would-be homers, builders made the fence — known as the Green Monster — 37 feet high.
But right field is arguably weirder. At the foul line, the fence stands at a league-shortest 300 feet. But just a few degrees toward center field, the fence becomes the league longest, stretching to 380 feet.
Why is Fenway so weird? It’s the oldest MLB stadium in use, built at a time when ballparks were defined by the neighborhoods of the cities they were in. After a shift to cookie-cutter stadiums all with similar dimensions, newer parks have been designed to reclaim that charm.
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