Thomas Boswell: Unfair Measures

The Washington Post
Sunday, October 28, 2007; D01

DENVER

Is baseball, as played here in mile-high Coors Field, really baseball at all? Before we go there, let me grab your attention.

Imagine two players. Both bat 600 times a year. In a long career, the first hits .367 and averages 39 homers and 138 RBI. The second, in four years, hits .364 while averaging 39 homers and 138 RBI. Both have averages as good as Ty Cobb and more RBI a year than Babe Ruth. So, they might be the two best hitters in history.

Now, let's look at two other players, prorated over 600-at-bat seasons. In his career, the first man hits .295 and averages 25 homers and 92 RBI -- good stats, but not all-star stats for a first baseman. The second hits .273 with 19 homers and 82 RBI. The Nats' Ryan Church?

The two superstars in the first example are Todd Helton and Matt Holliday of the Rockies -- when they play at home.

The players in the second example are also Helton and Holliday -- when they play on the road.

Every other player who has started for the Rockies in the World Series is a variation on this pattern, except one -- Brad Hawpe, who performs identically at home or away. The ability of altitude -- and high altitude alone -- to make Cobbs and Ruths of merely good players is the defining characteristic of baseball when it is played a mile in the air. Yes, every fly ball travels farther, maybe as much as 10 percent, though experts disagree on how much. Yes, every pitch arrives at the plate sooner, perhaps adding six inches to a fastball. And, yes, all pitches designed to curve do not break as much. Curveballers think Coors is hell on earth.

However, it is the compounding effect of all these factors that makes baseball here so bizarre. Because the ball travels so far, the fences must be pushed way back to prevent nightly home run derbies. Coors's fence from deep left-center field to deep right-center field measures 424, 415 and 420 feet. No other park is nearly as remote. This creates enormous gaps in the alleys for outfielders to defend. As a result many balls -- routine outs in every other park -- fall to the grass. Contact, rather than quality of contact, gets inordinate value here. Helton, for example, has averaged fewer than 75 strikeouts per season.

Altitude also changes the essential nature of pitching. A hurler with a good fastball and hard sinker or slider will gain a few inches in speed here and be slightly more effective than elsewhere in avoiding solid contact. Change-ups work, too, since hitters often top them. However, the pitching values established in the sport's other 29 franchises are invalidated here. A high-quality curve or splitter or knuckleball -- any pitch that must break a lot, rather than swerving a little at the last instant -- is devalued.

The Rockies required years, and tens of millions of dollars in squandered contracts to free agent pitchers who depended on big breaking balls, to realize they had to customize. The infield grass here was allowed to grow as high as an infielder's eye to help ground ball pitchers. Finally, this season, Rockies pitchers meshed with their milieu so well that they allowed only 34 more runs at home than away.

Now we come to the ironic beauty of this World Series. You'd think there couldn't possibly be another team with such an extreme preference for its home digs as the Rockies, who hit .298 with 103 homers and 478 runs in Coors Field, but only .261 with 68 homers and 382 runs on the road. But there is another similar club -- the Red Sox, who hit .297 with 472 runs in Fenway Park, but batted .262 with 395 runs on the road.

Are the Rockies' feats in Coors Field just a mile-high version of what Boston does by smacking balls off its left field wall? Should we view both Fenway and Coors as curiosities to be enjoyed, not aberrations to annoy us? Or are they different?

For decades, fans have adored Fenway for its Green Monster, deep triangle in center field, spacious right field, tiny foul territory and cozy Pesky Pole in right field. It's quirky, individual, unique: so like life. That's the company line for generations.

As a result, Fenway's sins are forgiven. The game, as played there, is warped, but how could it be helped? The park had to be squeezed into a crowded neighborhood. So, the goofy statistics generated in Boston are accepted. Some hitters, like David Ortiz, do better there than they could anywhere else. Big Papi has hit .321 in his career at Fenway and .280 elsewhere. Some pitchers, especially southpaws, are penalized at birth. Is that "fair?" Baseball's received wisdom about Fenway: That's life. Get over it.

However, many of those same fans, including me, have disliked Coors from the day it opened. Baseball at high altitude was a necessary-evil accommodation that the industry made so that a sports-hungry town could be brought into the game.

This series has finally forced me to recognize why mile-high baseball bothers me so much. And why it may not bother others, including 99 percent of the population of this city, at all. I'm one of those people who finds beauty in the geometry of baseball -- the accidental distances established in the 1860s, which somehow turned out to be perfect. At times, Fenway may be a fluky bandbox but at least all the proportions of the game, all the relative distances that have proved so enjoyable for so long, are maintained.

If baseball had been invented in Denver, perhaps the bases would be 94 feet apart and the pitchers mound only 59 feet 7 inches from home plate. Maybe the hitter would only get two strikes, and there would be 10 men on a team, so that there would be enough fielders to cover the enormous outfield. Or, perhaps, if the sport had begun here, it would have died here, too, because something hard to define, the very aesthetics of the sport, would never have come into existence.

In Game 3 of this series, much of what is worst about Coors was on display as the Red Sox scored six runs in the third inning. Colorado starter Josh Fogg is not a "Coors-style pitcher." His ERA here this season was 5.97, as opposed to 4.15 on the road. He doesn't specialize in either strikeouts or ground balls -- the two results that a pitcher welcomes here.

The Red Sox may not have played much in Coors before. But they know the first rule of attack here: Don't stop running. Always take the extra base. Because every outfielder is, by normal definition, out of position and every base-running calibration is different. Only the slowest runners can't go first to third. Anybody should score from second base on a single.

In that one inning, the Red Sox had seven hits and six runs off Fogg without a home run. But the lumbering Ortiz scored from second on a single. Manny Ramirez attempted to do the same and, if he had not visited the Red Sox' dugout as he rounded third, would have been safe by feet instead of out by inches. Two runs, not one, scored on a bases-loaded single by a pitcher because, even for weak hitters, outfielders must play deeper. And a slicing fly that would have ended most innings elsewhere eluded the Rockies for an RBI double.

So, what are we to make of the athletic activity being attempted here at Coors Field? Is it baseball?

For others, including many here, it is a perfectly valid, though radically different, form of the game. For me, it's junk.

Luckily, the Romans had a phrase for such disputes: "De gustibus non disputandum est." There is no use in disputing about matters of taste. When in Denver, do like the Romans. That way, maybe the nice folks here will let me out of town alive.