ESPN has two pieces about New Yankee Stadium:
New Yankee Stadium a home run nightmare
“With the way the wind has been the last couple of days, right field is a joke,” one official said. “I would say at least three or four home runs in this series would be routine outs in nearly every park.”
(at this pace)….there would be about 400 homers hit in the park this year — or an increase of about 250 percent. In the last year of old Yankee Stadium, in 2008, there were a total of 160 homers.
Buster Olney writes in a separate column
Sure, there are a handful of problems that need to be sorted out in Citi Field, the Mets’ new ballpark. The visiting relievers can’t really see the games from their bullpen in right-center field, and their video screen operates with a delay of about 15 seconds (by the count of the Brewers’ relievers). There is little hot water and no music in the visiting clubhouse, and they need to squeegee out the whirlpool because of a drainage issue.
But those are minor details that can be ironed out eventually. The Yankees, on the other hand, might have a whopper of a problem on their hands that could have long-term, big-picture ramifications for them. Their new ballpark is playing like Coors Field East.
The Yankees totaled five homers Friday, and the Indians launched six Saturday. If you include the two exhibition games played against the Cubs the weekend before the season started, there have been 25 homers in five games, and already word has gotten around baseball about the acute hitting conditions at the new park in the Bronx. A number of rival executives wrote e-mails late Saturday indicating that they’d heard from their own scouts and other sources that new Yankee Stadium plays very, very differently than old Yankee Stadium.
