Now physicists and nuclear engineers are trying to figure out how to stop the moonshot madness at the new Yankee Stadium.
Already, 26 homers have cleared the walls of the ballpark in the first six games — more than any other new stadium in history over the same amount of time and on pace for a record-shattering 325 dingers this year. Houston’s Minute Maid Park holds the first-season record of 266.
So two passionate fans, Illinois University physics professor Alan Nathan and former US Navy nuclear engineer Greg Rybarczyk, have teamed with sports-media firm Sportvision to study the wind’s effect on home runs at Yankee Stadium.
The team will analyze video to evaluate the speed and angle of home-run balls as they come off bats to compare where they would have landed in a weather-free environment with where they actually did land.
“We can then figure out the atmospheric conditions,” Nathan said.
Rybarczyk, who founded homer-analyzing site hittrackeronline.com, said wind was the likely culprit, with open concourses allowing more airflow than ever.
If that’s the case, he said, there’s an easy fix: Screen off the concourses from the wind.
Such tactics have been employed before at Major League launching pads.
In 2000, when the Houston Astros saw the record number of homers fly out of their new stadium, the team screened the bullpen and moved the home-run line on the outfield fence from just under 10 feet to 25 feet. Last year, there were 191 homers at Minute Maid.
In 1994, when their new Ballpark at Arlington seemed to give hitters an unfair advantage, the Texas Rangers installed mesh screens near the top of the park.
But the most creative way to prevent dingers emerged in Denver, where the dry, thin air helped 241 balls clear the fences during the inaugural season at Coors Field in 1995. The team started storing balls in a humidor to fill them with moisture. In 2008, there were only 174 homers hit.
Nathan said a humidor would work for the Yanks only if balls were stored at 100 percent humidity, as compared to 50 in Denver, because New York is so humid.
If done, it could “make a 5-to-6-foot change in how far the ball travels.”
The Bombers could take a page out of baseball promoter Joe Engel’s playbook in 1936, when his Class AA Chattanooga Lookouts froze baseballs.
“They can keep them in an ice bucket, [at] about 30 degrees,” Nathan said. “That would slow them down.”
MLB spokesman Pat Courtney said the team would need permission to store balls in such ways.
The Yanks are closely watching the number of dingers in The Bronx.
“It’s something we’re going to have to keep our eye on, because, clearly, the numbers don’t lie,” GM Brian Cashman said.