Vinnie Pasquantino has no problem hitting the baseball out of Kauffman Stadium.
He might get some help in the season ahead, though. The Kansas City Royals are moving in the fences about 10 feet. It should increase home runs.
And Royals fans who are wondering what the slugger thinks of it didn’t have to look far. He’s one of the most active MLB players on X, and he weighed in on this.
Pasquantino’s message was long, so we’ll break it into a few highlights here.
“The K was the 6th most hitter friendly ballpark according to the park factor. Will moving the fences in make this better or worse? Hitters like hitting at the K because the visuals are nice but everyone also agrees it’s been a pitchers park forever. What this means is that you can’t hit cheap homers. That’s literally all a hitter saying a park is a hitters park or not means.”
The suggestion here is that it already wasn’t a bad place to hit. It was just a hard place to get a medium-well hit fly ball over the wall.
There were benefits to the deep fences for hitters, too.
“The data firmly supports it being a hitters paradise because you can get more singles doubles and triples. Will the park factor actually go down if it’s more of a neutral park because there will be less triples even if there is an uptick in home runs? What will this mean for WRC+, we get punished with this stat for playing at the K now. So what will happen?”
Pasquantino wrapped up his major thoughts with this:
“All in all I truly believe hitters/pitchers alike just want fairness but we play one of the only sports where the field size changes and I think that’s one of the cooler things about our game. I just rambled a lot but I think it’s cool the Royals were willing to make these changes to make it more of a neutral ballpark.”
So he certainly doesn’t mind the changes. He also expects it to impact the overall hitting experience – maybe in the form of more home runs and fewer hits of other kinds.
What makes this interesting is Pasquantino’s analytical approach to the whole thing. He’s not just thinking about dingers. The first baseman understands that park dimensions effect more than just home run totals.
It’ll be fascinating to see how it all plays out when the season starts.
