The Rangers and Yankees split a doubleheader on Sunday. It moved the Yankees to 19-8 on the season, good enough for first place in the AL East. The Rangers moved to 11-15, but they’ve actually won five of their last six. And the only loss in there was in Sunday’s matinee, which ended on a Gleyber Torres walk-off home run — as seen here:
As we know, the right-field porch in Yankee Stadium is notoriously short, though it’s not as drastic going into the gaps and probably not nearly as exaggerated as non-Yankee fan public sentiment. Still, the reputation persists. Just ask Rangers manager Chris Woodward:
Yep, there it is. 🔥🔥🔥. A Little League park! That’ll certainly get the headlines. It earned this one. Of course, there’s a thing called Statcast out there measuring everything these days and moving down to the gap in Yankee Stadium — as noted earlier — it isn’t nearly that bad. Torres’ shot wasn’t all the way to the measurement, but the right-center gap is 385 and that’s deeper than the average ballpark.
And as mentioned in the above tweet, Torres’ home run leaves the yard in 26 of the 30 MLB ballparks. Like I said, we have tools that measure anything in 2022.
Yankees manager Aaron Boone was asked about the comment and had a pretty funny answer.
It’s true! You can’t specifically get to 99 percent until 100. If Torres’ fly ball would’ve been an out in 29 of the 30 parks, that’s 96.667 percent.
Also humorous in all of this is the Rangers got on the board with this Eli White home run in the second game of the doubleheader.
That one clocked in at 342 feet and according to the available metrics, would be a home run in just two of the 30 MLB ballparks.
This a good time to say that during the course of a nine-inning game, both teams are able to take advantage of the ballpark dimensions an equal number of times.
Then again, it’s pretty funny to see a manager call an opposing ballpark “Little League” and witness the ensuing fallout. Go nuts, everyone.
