COMMENTARY : My Pop Fly, His Home Run

Imagine,if you can, the Washington Redskins traveling to Dallas to play on a field 110 yards long, then flying to San Francisco to play on a 90-yard field, then back to Washington, where the goal post is on the goal line, and off to Philadelphia, where it is at the end of the end zone but 10 feet narrower.

It’s now winter, and the Bullets are in Boston to play Larry Bird with a 12-foot basket. From there they arrive in Chicago to face Michael Jordan and a nine-foot hoop. The floor in Houston is 10 feet longer than the one in Los Angeles, the Phoenix foul line two feet closer than the Portland line, etc.

If you can imagine all that, you can imagine the insane hodgepodge world that major league baseball has been playing in for the past 114 years, where a 486-foot drive in Yankee Stadium was an out, and a 258-foot pop in the Polo Grounds was a home run.

This is the wonderful world of the future that the Baltimore Orioles want to go back to with their new “asymmetrical” park. Thursday, as they have for the past 35 years, the Orioles opened their home season in Memorial Stadium, where the distances to all points in right and left fields correspond to one another.

But in 1992, the team is to move to its new park, where, we are told, right handers will have to hit a ball 334 feet to reach the fence, but lefties will have to hit it only 319 feet. True, there will be a high wall for lefties, but the fact remains that their drives will hit the wall for doubles, while the same drives by right-handers will settle into the outfielders’ gloves for outs.

Presumably the higher fence in right field evens things up. Ask Jim Rice of Boston. He estimates that Fenway’s infamous wall cost him more home runs than it helped him get, as his low line drives banged into the wall instead of whistling through it 20 feet more for a homer somewhere else.

Of all people, Oriole Manager Frank Robinson should know that this is absurd and unfair. Playing in Crosley Field, Cincinnati, Robbie smacked many a two-base hit against the high scoreboard in left-center. The year he was traded to Baltimore, the Reds drew a white line across the scoreboard and decreed that any hit above the line would be a home run. If they had done it while he was playing, Frank says, he could have hit 10 more home runs a year, 100 more in a career. (How does a lifetime 686 sound?)

Hank Greenberg, the pride of the Bronx, couldn’t play for the Yankees because lefty Lou Gehrig was installed on first base and aiming at the tempting 296-foot low right-field railing there. So the right-handed Greenberg played for Detroit in cozy Tiger (then Briggs) Stadium instead. In 1938 Hank smashed 58 home runs, almost tying Babe Ruth. But 39 of them were at home. If he had played in Yankee Stadium, with its gaping “Death Valley” in left-field, he might have hit only 19 at home and ended with 38 for the year, nowhere close to Ruth.

When I asked Greenberg’s biographer, Ira Berkow, how Hank would have done in New York, Berkow relayed Hank’s posthumous answer: “I would have learned to hit lefty.” Back in the 1930s Mel Ott was the best, or worst, example of diamond gerrymandering. He lifted those patented seven-iron approach shots into the nearby upper deck in the Polo Grounds, and when he retired, he had 511 homers. They look good in the record book. But two-thirds of them came at home. In an average park, Ott might have ended with about 340, not 511.

You could have picked up Brooklyn’s tiny Ebbetts Field and dropped it inside Washington’s immense Griffith Stadium and had plenty of room left over. That’s why Duke Snider, Gil Hodges, Roy Campanella and other Dodger “sluggers” were able to bump so many homers out of the field.

I figure if Babe Ruth had played in Griffith Stadium instead of New York’s friendly “House that Ruth Built,” he would have hit about 40 homers in 1927, not 60, based on pro-rating his performance in both parks. (Of course, they would have pulled the Washington fences in for him.) Goose Goslin was Washington’s power hitter in the same era. He ended with only 248 homers to Ruth’s 714. But switch parks on Goslin and Ruth, and it might have been Goose’s record, not Babe’s, that Roger Maris broke. Kansas City’s stormy petrel, Charlie Finley, once tried to erect a wooden Yankee Stadium “short porch” in front of Kansas City’s right-field wall to dramatize the great advantage given to left-handed hitters on the Yankees. The umpires made him take it down, but he made his point.

Yes, today’s modern homogenized “toilet bowl” stadiums lack the crazy fun of the old parks, where line drives rolled under tarpaulins in the outfield, and overhanging upper decks caught easy flies before the waiting outfielders could. Making them charming again without making them a mockery of competition is a problem for the architects to wrestle with.

There are other ways to do it without arbitrarily and needlessly manipulating the dimensions. Even cutting down on foul territory, which Baltimore proposes, means giving many batters fourth strikes, as their lazy foul balls drift out of reach of the lunging third basemen. That’s as big a factor in Fenway’s bloated batting averages as the wall is. The stadium architects in great-grandfather’s day had an excuse for their lopsided designs. They had to fit their parks into the city block the teams had bought.

But today’s blueprint-and-protractor artists can’t plead that as an excuse. They have all the room they need. Arbitrarily making it easier on some hitters, or pitchers, is a cop-out.

Back to the drawing board. And hold those bulldozers.