This week’s Club Sportico essay focuses on a recent announcement by the Kansas City Royals, who revealed a potential competitive advantage that’s largely untapped across Major League Baseball.
The Royals on Tuesday announced a new change that the club believes will result in an extra 1.5 wins next season. It wasn’t a free agent signing, a new manager or a new piece of equipment (remember torpedo bats?). Instead it was a shift in engineering. The club is moving in the outfield walls at Kauffman Stadium and lowering the fences by 18” in most places.
In their explanation of the change, Royals executives showed just how much detail went into the planning. Kauffman Stadium is notoriously unfriendly to home run hitters—a product of its cavernous outfield and prevailing wind patterns—and the team recently deputized assistant GM Daniel Mack to study what an adjustment might look like.
Mack assigned a run value to every fly ball hit in Kauffman, then layered on the team’s current roster of hitters and pitchers, its opponents, the wind patterns and even the stadium’s altitude. He then played with distances and fence heights that would not only play around the league average, but also give this current Royals team a statistical advantage.
The result is a layout the team thinks will benefit its hitters—including generational star shortstop Bobby Witt Jr.—a lot more than it will harm its pitchers, who had among the lowest fly ball rates of any staff in the majors last season. Welcome to the “Moneywall Era.”
Is this a new trend coming for MLB parks across the U.S.? That’s explored in the back half of the essay. Here is an excerpt ✍️:
So what’s to stop a team from looking at its roster every offseason and making tweaks to its fences? Or more dramatically, what’s to stop a team from putting its outfield wall on tracks and moving it based on who’s in town, which way the wind is blowing, or who’s starting on the mound?
The answer, technically, is nothing (!). MLB’s 191-page rule book is light on guidelines for the dimensions of the outfield. The centerfield wall must be at least 400 feet from the plate, and the rest of the outfield wall must be at least 325 feet. That’s for venues built after 1958, which allows stadiums like Fenway Park to get away with its 302-foot right field fence.
According to someone familiar with the broader league bylaws, MLB has no limit on the number of times you can make changes (more on that later). That said, there are a few reasons you might not see a rush of alterations at ballparks across America. The biggest one—of course—involves money. Construction isn’t cheap, of course, but neither are the tickets that sit right up against the outfield walls.
In addition to helping the team on the field, the Royals’ move will add about 230 seats in Kaufman’s left and right field seating areas. If we assume for a moment that those tickets cost $80 each, that’s an additional $1.5 million in sales annually for the team (before accounting for the extra beer volume). For reference, Royals revenue in 2024 was $320 million.
If there’s any team for whom cost would be irrelevant, it’s the Mets. And billionaire owner Steve Cohen moved Citi Field’s fences in three years ago, but that move wasn’t about on-field play. It allowed the team to build out a new club area with living room-style seats and personal TVs.
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