So no one even needs to argue with you, you just need to re-read, your argument has already been disproven.

Do the Ms win inordinately few games at home? I don’t believe so (note: I can’t find the Ms historical home/road splits).

Do Ms’ righties hit worse on the road as a result of their struggles at home? That is, is there any carryover effect? I haven’t seen any evidence of that.

Have the Ms generally had trouble winning over the years since they moved to Safeco? Not at all – in fact, they won more games than any team in any season ever in 2001, and they were the winningest team in baseball for a 3 or four year stretch there from 2000-2003.

It’s not about changing the field – it’s about understanding it, and making smart moves based on that understanding.

As for “parks that destroy RH hitting”, I give you the 20′s-60′s Yankees (with 457 foot distances to Death Valley). Go look at DiMaggio’s home/road splits sometime. I think Bill Dickey had this happen as well.

The Astrodome was also notorious for killing hitters- Jimmy Wynn, Joe Morgan, Glenn Davis, Jose Cruz, and Dodger Stadium was pretty awful for killing offense in the 1960′s, too…somehow those organizations survived this.

I’d point out that in theory, unless someone’s moving the fences during half-innings, the other team’s righty hitters get just as screwed by Safeco as ours do- so there’s nothing wrong with having a park that does that, per se (the Yankees won for YEARS in old Yankee Stadium). The front office COULD make the correct evaluations of talent realizing that: “yeah, it does look like Beltre sucks, but it’s really park effects”, or “yeah, it does look like Ryan Franklin is a good pitcher, but that’s the park”.

But since that takes some rather sophisticated ability to do that…and the front office has never really hit that level of sophistication (though ya never know, i might be pleasantly surprised one day)…yeah, rdoing the park a bit seems logical.

Which is probably what both Junior (like msb said in #44) and ARod saw — one a lefthanded hitter and the other righthanded — when they first tried out Safeco’s dimensions with Edgar and Bone before the July 1999 opening date.

ALL of them expressed some worry/doubt/concern about those ballpark dimensions, and some of us (including me) ascribed the concern at the time — at least as far as Junior and ARod went — to how much the dimensions would hurt accumulation of HOF-worthy stats.

(of course, Fenway Park does the same thing to both flyball and line-drive hitters; righthand linedrive hitters bounce a lot of singles off the Wall, and lefthanders hit a lot of flyball outs to RF)

Its seems to me that instead of fixing the ball park they just keep throwing money at really good righties hoping they’ll give respectible numbers. Which probably wouldn’t be a big deal if they signed AL guys. But signing guys from the NL who have to adjust to better pitching and then adjust to a harder park is just asinine. Especially when Beltre didn’t need to go to a ballpark that would kill his confidence.

As for the pitching thats what happens when you spend so many years refusing to give that 4th year of a contract. If the FO would just start offering the same kind of contracts as the rest of the league they wouldn’t have this problem with crapy pitching.

I was trying to look for the splits for 2001 since to see if they show the same thing but for the life of me I can find the stats anywhere, anyone want to be kind and do the leg work?

I guess I’m not totally married to the idea that the humidor has made Coors a neutral park. The point is that as long as Coors has played as a neutral park (because it has this year), the Rockies have been a more even-keeled team, and I consider that desirable. Having “character” to your ballpark is fine–teams like Boston and Minnesota (names that come to mind quickly) have won World Series with quirky, somewhat-hitter friendly parks.

There’s not a long history of parks playing with a 20-ish percent park factor favoring hitters or pitchers, but what little history we have seems to suggest that it’s pretty tough to be a successful major league organization playing in such a weird park. Why fight it? Safeco can still have character and be a little more neutral for righties. RHB shouldn’t have to play two different games–one at home and a different one on the road.