From: jjd@TEAK.CRAY.COM (Jeff Drummond)
Newsgroups: rec.sport.baseball
Subject: Re: ARTIFICIAL TURF: EMBARRASSMENT TO THE GAME
Date: 21 Jul 92 21:43:50 GMT


In article <1992Jul21.190217.29416@nntpd.lkg.dec.com> you write:
>
>Go figure is right.  We've been through this before.  Fenway Park does not
>change the basic character of the game.

Basic character of the game???  Like the number of players you can have
on the field?  The distance between the bases?  Or is it more basic than
that?

>                                         Fenway Park does not turn
>weakly-hit ground balls into singles and bloopers into doubles, and
>sharply-hit balls in the infield into outs (a property of artificial
>turf).

The quirks of the MetroMuffin, like those of Fenway, really only affect
a very small proportion of all hit balls.  Boston saw a few of them this
weekend, but over the course of a year, they average out to be pretty
infrequent.

>        Fenway Park does not affect at all balls that are hit in the
>infield or which drop in front of outfielders.  In fact, Fenway Park does
>not significantly affect balls put into play that travel any less than
>300-350 feet.

You say TO-MAY-TOE, I say TOH-MA-TOE.  The MetroMuffin uniquely effects
a small percentage of infield hits and the occasional blooper.  Fenway
uniquely effects a small percentage of extra base hits, primarily to
left field (some singles become doubles, etc).  I think the overall
effect on the game is miniscule in either case.

>               In general, Fenway Park affects the value of certain
>extra-base hits, both positively and negatively, and that's about it. 

Yep.  And I would same something similar for the MetroMuffin.  I've
seen opposing teams get infield `turf' hits.  The turf, like the wall,
cuts both ways.

>It's aesthetics.  Anyone is perfectly free to like that which they prefer
>(although I've seen polls that say that baseball fans don't generally like
>domes and artificial turf).

It's partly aesthetics, but logic and proportion seem to go out the
window when certain subjects come up (turf, domes, DH, etc).  A batter
could hit a high chopper off the plate for an infield hit in every park
in the Majors, and in most stadia, people wouldn't think twice about it.

I won't comment on the meaning or validity of polls of baseball fans.

>                             I like the occasional quirk as much as the
>next guy, but if you get your kicks from fly balls dropping from dangling
>speaker wires, I can't argue with you... 

Well, I've seen (or heard of) maybe a dozen balls hitting the
wires/speakers in the MetroMuffin in the past 10 years; and in
most of those cases, it had no effect on the game.  It's hard to
get much of a kick out of something that infrequent.  The really
amazing thing about Saturday's deflection was not that Clark's
foul ball hit the speaker, but that Reboulet managed to catch it.
If I was Clark, I'd be pissed too.  It's easy to imagine that he
would have hit a home run if that foul hadn't been deflected _and_
caught, but most likely he'd have made an out some other way
(batters succeed less than half of the time--even in the Magical
MetroMuffin).

The best way to win _any_ baseball game in _any_ ball park is to
get a large enough lead such that no quirk (bad hop, carom, speaker
deflection, etc.) is going to cost you the game.  Put another way,
if your team needs a perfect playing surface to win, you're in for
some disappointments.

>---
>Glenn Waugaman
>Digital Equipment Corporation
>Littleton, MA
>g_waugaman@nac.enet.dec.com
>---

We now return you to our regularly-scheduled tirades.

-Jeff    jjd@cray.com
--
"Attend to your bullpen; the bounces will take care of themselves."
-Benjamin Franklin in "Poor Richard's Baseball Almanac"