The answer? Not nearly as well, at least from a power perspective.
This isn’t shocking information, given that Yankee Stadium obviously caters to power, particularly to right field, while Citi Field is more pitcher-friendly, but the Wall Street Journal crunched the actual numbers.
With the help of HitTrackerOnline’s Greg Rybarczyk and the ESPN Stats and Information Group, they looked at every home run hit at the new Yankee Stadium by seven prominent members of the Yankees’ regular lineup, including Alex Rodriguez, Mark Teixeira, Derek Jeter, Curtis Granderson, Robinson Cano, Nick Swisher and Jorge Posada.
They found that of the 242 homers hit by the seven players at Yankee Stadium since its debut in 2009, only 120 (49.6%) would have cleared the fence at Citi Field, assuming average weather conditions. The player affected the most? Derek Jeter. Just four of his 20 homers would have left Citi Field. And none to the opposite field.
As for Alex Rodriguez, he would have lost 41 percent of his home runs if he played his home games at Citi Field. We saw this first-hand last night, as Rodriguez hit a mammoth shot to left-center field in the ninth inning that would have been a home run at just about any other ballpark. But thanks to the “Great Wall of Flushing,” he had to settle for an RBI double.
There has been some clamoring for the Mets to move the fences in, but I’m not entirely convinced that minor alterations would make that much of a difference. Rybarczyk said as much in a study he did last month. If cutting the left field fence in half would help some of the hitters psychologically (I’m talking to you, Jason Bay), I suppose I could see some advantage to that. However, I actually enjoy the fact that Citi Field and Yankee Stadium are so vastly different.
