For hitters, Nationals Park is more fair

There were times during the Washington Nationals’ first homestand at RFK Stadium in 2005 when someone would connect with a pitch and send the ball flying toward the power alleys, causing general manager Jim Bowden (and surely others) to jump out of his seat in anticipation of the forthcoming home run.

Each time, the ball would be caught somewhere well short of RFK’s deep outfield fence, and Bowden (and fans) would slink back into his seat, coming to grips with the fact this park was a hitter’s nightmare.

One month into the 2008 season, that kind of scene rarely plays out at Nationals Park. The new home of baseball in the District bears no resemblance to RFK in comfort, amenities, cleanliness … or power numbers.

If the first 18 games played on South Capitol Street have taught Bowden and Co. anything, it’s that they’ve got themselves a ballpark that is fairly, well, fair.

“If you hit it, it’s going to get out of this park,” Bowden said. “That being said, the pitchers have a chance to win here. It’s certainly not a bandbox.”

Hardly. While Nationals Park is far more amenable to hitters than RFK was, it’s nowhere close to a hitter’s haven like Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia or Great American Ball Park in Cincinnati.

It pretty much plays straight down the line: a ballpark that favors neither hitters nor pitchers.

“A lot of the balls that are hit well, they go out,” said Ryan Zimmerman, who hit the Nationals’ first homer in the stadium on Opening Night. “And then the ones that go off the end of the bat, they get close, but they don’t go. I think that’s fair.”

That’s basically how the men and women who designed Nationals Park wanted the facility to play. After watching batter after batter grumble over how difficult it was to hit one out at RFK — where the gaps in left-center and right-center were listed at 380 feet but were in reality more than 390 feet from the plate — former team president Tony Tavares pushed for smaller dimensions at the club’s new home.

Smaller but not too small.

The Nationals ended up with a stadium that fits right into the middle of the pack dimension-wise. It’s 336 feet down the left-field line, 377 feet to left-center, 402 feet to straight center field, 370 feet to right-center and 335 feet down the right-field line. The only change the Lerner family made upon buying the team was to lower the fence down the right-field line from 12 feet to eight feet to allow defenders the chance to make leaping catches.

“It was certainly Tony Tavares’ desire to be more of a pitchers’ park than a hitters’ park,” Bowden said. “But certainly not RFK, too. We all recognized that wasn’t going to work.”

Even though the sample size is small, it’s already obvious Nationals Park favors hitters more than RFK did, though perhaps not as much as the casual observer might think.

There were 243 games played at RFK from 2005 to 2007. The Nationals and their opponents averaged 1.65 homers, 8.53 runs and 5.66 extra-base hits in those games.

In the 18 regular-season games played so far at Nationals Park, there have been an average of 1.72 homers, 9.22 runs and 5.44 extra-base hits.

A more-telling statistic, though, might be ESPN.com’s “Park Factor,” which compares the rate of stats at home versus the rate of stats on the road. A park with a factor greater than 1.0 favors hitters; anything less than 1.0 favors pitchers.

In 2007, RFK Stadium’s park factor for home runs was 0.676, which ranked 30th (last) in the majors. So far in 2008, Nationals Park’s rating is 1.148, which ranks sixth.

“It’s not RFK,” manager Manny Acta said. “That’s the way I want it. That’s the way every manager wants it, at least when their pitchers are out there.”

The park doesn’t necessarily appear to play equally fair to all fields. Unlike RFK, it appears easier to hit home runs to the gaps at Nationals Park than down the lines.

A good chunk of the 31 homers hit at the stadium so far have landed either in the Red Porch seats (which jut out slightly from deep left-center field) or above the out-of-town scoreboard in right-center (which stands 12 feet high but in places is less than 370 feet from the plate).

Bowden believes the prevalence of “Porch” shots could be a result of wind that enters the park in the gap that splits the upper deck on the first-base side and pushes balls out toward that sliver of real estate in left-center, such as Zimmerman’s walk-off homer on Opening Night and Chipper Jones’ similar blast earlier in that game.

“I think the gap that exists on the first-base side adds a little more punch,” Bowden said. “We’ve seen Chipper go up there a couple times, [Zimmerman] go a couple of times. The ball has a little more life when it gets to that one particular area that it doesn’t 30 more feet to the left.”

Not that anyone believes those homers came cheaply to Zimmerman, Jones and the other players who have reached the red seats thus far.

If anything, there haven’t appeared to be any undeserving homers at the park through the season’s first month. Nor have there been any rockets off the bat that came up well short of the wall.

The Nationals wanted to build a fair ballpark, and they appear to have succeeded in doing just that.

“We’re pretty happy with our ballpark, and I think even the visiting teams are,” Acta said. “There’s no complaints about our park.”

NEW SERIES

WASHINGTON NATIONALS at HOUSTON ASTROS

Where: Minute Maid Park, Houston

Today: 8:05 p.m., Nationals RHP Shawn Hill (0-0, 3.50) vs. Astros RHP Shawn Chacon (0-0, 3.32).

Tomorrow: 8:05 p.m., Nationals RHP Odalis Perez (0-3, 3.18) vs. Astros RHP Roy Oswalt (3-3, 5.57).

Thursday: 8:05 p.m., Nationals LHP John Lannan (2-3, 3.74) vs. Astros RHP Brandon Backe (2-3, 4.42).

Series breakdown: Washington is just 4-10 on the road this season, but this would seem as good a chance as any to turn it around. They will have a tough matchup with Oswalt tomorrow, but the former Cy Young winner is still struggling to find his curveball. Washington has three of its most consistent starters throwing against an Astros lineup that, outside of Miguel Tejada, Lance Berkman and Carlos Lee, isn’t intimidating. Houston has the NL’s second-worst on-base percentage at .307.

— Ben Goessling