TheYanks04 wrote:They would have to not only reduce the temperature but increase the thickness of the air to that of sea level. I have no idea what processes would be involved, but the problem is the air's thinness and the only way to fix it imo is to change the air to make it like that of other parks. It would likely be enormously expensive though to implement.
Ok you're talking about increasing the air pressure, right? I think that would take sealing the dome, probably not doable or even allowable.
I think the most practical idea would be to play night games and schedule most of the home games early in the season and in Sept. Night games because the temperature and humidity drop considerably at night in Denver.
If they build a dome with extreme A/C they could simulate the temp and humidity of a Denver night, at quite a cost for sure.
luckygehrig wrote:Out of all the new parks that have been built recently the worst one by far is US Cellular. It's not fan-friendly at all. As far as Coors goes, I have no problem with it being a HR park. I think it's bull that they get to humidify their balls as this doesn't happen at any other park. Why should they get to change/modify the most important piece of equipment for a baseball game when no other stadium does. Should Petco get to dehumidfy their balls to encourage more HRs? (I actually don't even know if that's possible/would work, but I hope you can see my point anyway)
I don't think other teams are prohibited from using a humidor, or am I incorrect?
The new Twins stadium (if it passes the state legislature...which it is more than likely this time around it will) will be by a trash incinerator (it is late and spelling is bad). I am not sure if that's the best spot....but hey....at least it's outdoor baseball!
I can picture it now. Sitting down in my seat. Ordering a Dome dog (going to have to rename those also). Looking out at the skyline of the city while taking in a good ol' deep breath through the nose to smell the freshly cut grass, etc. Then wanting to puke with that trash smell and seeing the "trash smoke" in the distance.
Ah, an outdoor stadium right by a trash incinerator. Brilliant planning.
You can't compare US Cellular to all the newer ballparks because it was built before Camden and the whole retro boom. It needs to be compared to the Skydome (and what else was built back then?). And the Cell is so much better than the antiseptic institutional Skydome (unless it's filled to the rafters, a la early 90s).
As for Coors, I've never heard of pressurized dome as a solution, but it does sound logical. Never gonna happen, and I like it that way. Denver is wacky baseball land and that's rather entertaining because it's one out of 30. Probably sucks to be a Rockies fan though, as building a team that can win at both home and on the road is very difficult.
The only problem with the Rockies is the color purple.
Teams spend millions trying to build a park with "character". Coors is notorious. I see no reason why they would want to replace it. A couple of winning seasons and folks will be defending the thin air as a great homefield advantage.
theclefe wrote:The only problem with the Rockies is the color purple.
Teams spend millions trying to build a park with "character". Coors is notorious. I see no reason why they would want to replace it. A couple of winning seasons and folks will be defending the thin air as a great homefield advantage.
Hey purple was good for the Roman emperors, it can have its place in baseball.
The game in Denver has become almost comical in the way pitching is almost worthless and the hitters become so used to curve balls not breaking much many of them can't hit on the road very well. Vinny Castilla owes mos of his numbers to Coors. There is something wrong with that.
Rox management obvious is not really serious about winning either, and you combine the two and you have a perrenial cellar dwellar infalting hitting stats and salaries throughout baseball. I do not think that is good for anyone.
They have played with humidors and other things to little effect. ACing the place could help a lot. Pressurizing or whatever would be the ideal way to go but it is probaly an unfeasible thing to do from a cost point of view.
nuggets wrote:The only people I've heard of petitioning for taller fences in Coors are: John Kruk, Harold Reynolds and, I think Joe Morgan. Personally I don't care and am fine with the novelty of the super runs park, although there has been some nice pitching there this year...apparently they are soaking the balls in water or something....
Yeah, a humidor, whatever the heck that is.
Humidor is the thing that cigars are stored in.
Really, they're nothing more than a mini-sauna of sorts. Enclosed space that are heated and that you feed water to. Water evaporates, making the air humid (humid, humidor, get it?) and keeping whatever it is you want kept humid, i.e. not dry, humid. I read once that Ichiro has a humidor for his bats to keep them always in the same condition.
The idea for baseballs is that by keeping the balls humid, they're heavier by the virtue of holding more water. Therefore, the same application of force makes them travel a lesser distance. Would have to think it through, but there may also be an effect that keeping them humid makes them more absorbant to striking, i.e. getting hit by a bat imparts somewhat less of a force. But not really sure. That's off the cuff.
While reading a column about the Colorado Rockies (don't ask), I ran across what I believe to be a specious argument concerning home runs and high-altitude ballparks. Apparently people think that the "thin air" at Coors Field makes it easy to hit home runs. My understanding is that high-altitude air has the same chemical composition as low-altitude air, just lower pressure. Of course, this explains why exercising is more difficult at altitude--lower pressure means less oxygen gets pushed through the extra-fine membranes in your lungs that separate your blood from the outside world. What it doesn't explain is how or why a batted baseball would fly any farther than usual. Wind resistance should be a function of the molecules that make up the air, right? If all air is (more or less) made up of the same bits, "thin air" at altitude shouldn't allow balls to fly better than they would at sea level. Also, atmospheric pressure, which co-varies with altitude, pushes on the ball from every direction, effectively canceling itself out; high altitude balls shouldn't benefit from changes in atmospheric pressure. Plus, air pressure co-varies with weather patterns, too, but you never hear anyone talking about how it's easier to hit homeruns on windy, low pressure days.
Anyway, I think I might have an explanation for the fact (if indeed it is a fact) that it's easier to hit homeruns at Coors Field--it's gravity, or, rather, lack of it. Gravity varies inversely with the square of the distance between two bodies, if I'm not mistaken. So, at Coors Field, you're just enough further from the center of the Earth to make home runs comparatively easy to hit. I'm no physicist, but I think I'm onto something here. What's the straight dope? --Nephew Noah
SDSTAFF bibliophage replies:
You might not like this, slugger, but I gotta call 'em like I sees 'em.
[A]tmospheric pressure, which covaries with altitude, pushes in on the ball from every direction, effectively canceling itself out.
Strike one. Try this experiment. Stand on the roof of your car while your friend drives along the highway at 110 m.p.h. Now tell me that the air pushes you in every direction equally. Oops. Didn't see that overpass coming, did you? Try this instead. Stick your hand out the window of a moving car. Whoops. Telephone pole. Maybe you should leave the experiments to someone else. The bit you learned in high school physics about air pressure pushing equally in all directions (assuming buoyancy is negligible) applies only when the object is not moving through the air (or, equivalently, when the air is not moving past the object). A baseball typically leaves the bat traveling about 110 MPH. Air has mass, so the ball has to push the air out of the way to continue on its trajectory, and the air pushes back. The amount of work the ball has to do is proportional to the mass of air it has to move, and that's proportional to the density of the air. (Air pressure is related but not identical to the density). Your friend has to stomp on the accelerator a little harder to maintain 110 MPH with you on the roof, but the ball doesn't have that kind of power source. So a batted ball in air slows down a lot, which reduces its range. A ball that would go 400 feet in air at sea level would go about 750 feet in a vacuum, just because it doesn't have to push the air out of the way. The air density in Denver is about 18% less than at sea level (assuming the temperature and humidity are the same), which works out to a 10% increase in range, or an extra 40 feet.
[A]ir pressure co-varies with weather patterns, too, but you never hear anyone talking about how it's easier to hit homeruns on windy, low pressure days.
Strike two. I don't know who you've been listening to, but where I come from, baseball commentators frequently refer to the effect of weather on the likelihood of hitting the long ball. If you're playing in the open, a 10 MPH tailwind can add 30 feet to the range (and a similar headwind can deduct 30 feet). Obviously, the stands at major league ballparks act as a windbreak, but they don't eliminate the wind. Temperature is another factor, because hot air is less dense than cold air. Due to air density alone, a ball will go about 20 feet farther on a hot summer day of 90 degrees F than on a cold spring evening of 40 F. The temperature of the ball augments the effect (perhaps as much as doubling it), because warm balls are livelier (bouncier) than cold balls and so will go farther. Humidity is a complicating factor. Humid air is less dense than dry air, but on the other hand, high humidity makes the balls deader (less bouncy).
[A]t Coors Field, you're just enough further from the center of the Earth to make home runs comparatively easy to hit.
Strike three, you're out. On the surface of the earth, gravity doesn't vary enough to be a major advantage to batters at any ballpark. Even if it did, the Colorado Rockies wouldn't be the beneficiaries. Remember that the earth is not a perfect sphere--sea level at the equator is 13 miles farther from the center of the earth than sea level at the north pole. When you also take into account centrifugal force from the rotation of the earth (which is greatest at the equator) this further reduces the gravity of the lower latitudes. Neglecting gravitational anomalies, I calculate gravity at Miami to be weaker than in Denver, despite Denver's higher elevation, because of Miami's lower latitude. But the effect is small, less than one part per thousand. The gravity at Seattle is a little stronger than at Denver, by a little more than one part in a thousand. Philadelphia, which is at about the same latitude as Denver, has stronger gravity, owing entirely to the difference in elevation, but only by about a half part per thousand. All these differences in gravity are negligible when compared to the effect of air density and wind. A ball might go one foot farther in Miami than in Seattle because of gravity, all else being equal. That's not much to speak of compared to the 40 feet difference due to Denver's thin air.
By the way, the oblateness of the earth leads to the interesting fact that although Mt. Everest is the highest mountain in the world, as measured relative to sea level, it is not the surface point farthest from the center of the earth. Chimborazo, a volcano in Ecuador (the same one as in the poem "Romance" by Turner) is about 8,000 feet shorter (relative to sea level) but because it's much closer to the equator, its peak is farther from the center of the earth. The gravity there is almost 4 parts per thousand weaker than in Denver, so I would weigh almost a pound less there. Chimborazo, Cotopaxi, they had stolen my weight away!
Undoubtedly Coors Field is a hitter's park, but there's more to it than just the fact that a batted ball goes farther in the thinner air. Pitchers are at a distinct disadvantage because they lack the same degree of control there. All pitches that depend on the aerodynamic properties of the spinning baseball (and that's most of them), are harder to throw well. The curve ball, for example, will curve only about two-thirds as much in Denver's thinner air. Balls batted toward right or left field, because they pick up sidespin when hit, tend to curve toward the outside by several tens of feet for the same reason that curve balls curve (the Magnus effect). Again, at higher elevation, the effect is weaker, so many balls that would curve foul at sea level stay fair in Denver. Another factor to consider is that a ball of a given distance doesn't stay in the air as long in thinner air, so a fielder doesn't have as much time to get to it.
But none of this would seem to give the Rockies an unfair advantage in terms of winning games, since their opponents have the same advantages and disadvantages when playing at Coors Field. The only real concern is that the thin air will make Rockies batters look better than they really are, and pitchers look worse than they really are. When it comes time to consider Rockies players for inclusion in the Hall of Fame, no doubt this will be taken into account. Luckily, there exist a pair of statistics, called "park factors" (one for batters and one for pitchers) that account for whether a park is a pitchers' park or a hitters' park. (I won't go into details, because it made my head hurt when I tried to understand it, but these statistics are calculated based on three years of data, and they do vary somewhat over time even at the same park). The higher the number of either statistic, the better the park is for hitters. Coors Field and Mile High Stadium (where the Rockies played before Coors Field was finished) have by far the highest park factors in majors, the factor for batters having been as high as 131 and for pitchers as high as 129 (100 is average). Over the last 100 years, no other park in the majors has had a park factor higher than 115 (both for batters and for pitchers, at Wrigley Field in 1969-71).
Even with their obvious advantages, the Rockies haven't racked up as many home runs as you might expect. They have hit as many as 239 homers in a year (in 1997). That's respectable, but only good enough for second place in the history of the National League (the Astros hit 249 in 2000) and tenth in the majors (the 1997 Mariners are first with 264, but in the American League where the designated hitter is allowed). The Rockies have scored as many as 968 runs in a season (in 2000), the most for any National League team since 1930, but nowhere near the record of 1220 runs (in only 133 games) set in 1894 by the Boston Beaneaters. (Now there's a team you don't want to be stuck on the bus with.) The Beaneaters later became the Boston Braves, and eventually the Atlanta Braves. I can't imagine why they changed the name.
Starting this year, the Rockies (who supply all the balls for games at Coors Field) are storing their balls in a humidor. This should make the balls deader (less bouncy). If it works (and it's too soon to say for sure), it should make the pitching staff happy by reducing their mile-high ERA to a more reasonable figure. For example, the Rockies managed to win about four-ninths of their games in 1999, even though their pitching staff had a combined Earned Run Average of 6.02. Since 1940, only the luckless '96 Tigers have had a higher ERA, and they won fewer than a third of their games. But again, since the Rockies and their opponents will use the same humidified balls, no team should have an advantage in terms of winning games.
So there you have it. Now there's only one thing in baseball I can't figure out. How in hell can a man with four balls walk? Sounds awfully painful to me.
I think the Tigers built the wrong stadium. They went from a bandbox stadium who's decay from years of disrepair made it inihabitable. So Illitch, being nothing if not cheap, decided to build a stadium that would be attractive to middle of the road pitchers and fit the needs of fast, line-drive slap hitters.
Gee what a coincidence that these types of players don't demand as much money as stud pitchers and HR hitters. Unfortunetly they have found that they don't have the hitters to fit the stadium and the middle of the road pitchers are still middle of the road even in a big yard.
Nice move by McHale and Illitch. Almost as smart as going from the AL East to the Central. (Again to save money by not having to spend $$ with the RedSox and Yanks).
They've moved the fences in some, and will some more in certain areas if they're smartening up at all. But the yard is still more of a graveyard for Tigers' hitters than a ballyard. Bad park.
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by nuggets » Tue Apr 25, 2006 2:07 am 
Bad park.
