There will be some noticeable changes at Comerica Park in the 2023 season.
The Detroit Tigers, owned by Ilitch Holdings, plan to move in the center-field wall at Comerica Park, the team announced Wednesday.
The center-field fence will be moved in 10 feet, making the wall 412 feet from home plate. The height of the walls will be lowered in center field (from 8.5 feet to 7 feet), right-center field (from 13 feet to 7 feet) and right field (from 8.5 feet to 7 feet).
“This has been a topic of conversation for quite some time within our organization,” Tigers president of baseball operations Scott Harris said in a statement. “We’re confident that this plan accomplishes our goals of improving offensive conditions on the hardest hit balls, while maintaining Comerica Park’s unique dimensions and style of play.”
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The dimensions at Comerica Park, long viewed as pitcher-friendly, have been set at 345 feet in left field, 370 feet in left-center field, 420 feet in center field, 365 right-center field and 330 feet in right field from 2003-2022.
Laser measurements of the outfield wall, as part of the research process, measured the old center-field wall at 422 feet. The new center-field distance, 412 feet, makes Comerica Park the second deepest ballpark in baseball, behind only Coors Field at 415. (The league average for center field is 402 feet.)
The Tigers began discussing changes to the outfield dimensions during the 2021 season, and those conversations intensified when CEO and chairman Christopher Ilitch hired Harris as the franchise’s president of baseball operations in September 2022, replacing former general manager Al Avila.
After hiring Harris, Ilitch assembled a team of confidants to evaluate the situation.
“My general opinion on dimensions is that I would prefer to be on one side of the aisle or the other,” Harris said Dec. 6 at the winter meetings in San Diego. “I would prefer to have the opportunity to have some asymmetry in the environments that we’re playing. Whether we are on one side of the aisle as a pitcher’s park, or on the other side of the aisle as a hitter’s park, we have the opportunity to build a team a certain way to take advantage of the dimensions 81 times a year, because we are the only team that plays in our environment 81 times a year. I would prefer not to be right down the middle.”
Comerica Park opened in 2000 with spacious dimensions that included a left-center field gap measured at 395 feet, which also featured a flagpole in play, a nod to the flagpole in center at Tiger Stadium for nearly 90 seasons.
Slugging outfielder Juan González, who joined the Tigers in November 1999 in a trade from the Texas Rangers, was the first player to publicly complain about the spacious dimensions. In July 2000, the impending free agent said the Tigers would need to move in the left- and left-center-field fences if they wanted to re-sign him to a long-term contract. Gonzalez signed elsewhere after the 2000 season, and the Tigers didn’t adjust their fences until 2003.
Before the start of the 2003 season, the Tigers built inner fences and shortened the distance in left-center to 370 feet. In 2005, the bullpens were moved from right field to the empty space in left field.
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Following Gonzalez’s comments, and despite the tweaks in 2003, many Tigers position players continued to complain. Sometimes, like in the case of Robbie Grossman last season, the dimensions created a mental challenge. Comerica Park has been a talking point amongst both hitters and pitchers around the majors.
“I know playing at Comerica Park is going to be good for me, especially with the big ballpark,” left-handed pitcher Eduardo Rodriguez said in March 2022, before his first season with the Tigers. “That’s the way I see it, and that’s the way I like it.”
Four of MLB’s five longest outs by distance since 2020 have occurred at Comerica Park.
On Sept. 14, Riley Greene crushed a 424-foot fly ball to center field for the third out in the bottom of the eighth inning. In 28 of 30 ballparks, Greene’s swing would have resulted in a go-ahead home run, but at Comerica Park, it ended the eighth. The Tigers lost, 2-1, to the Houston Astros.
The fly ball sparked another round of conversations.
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“It’s a game of inches,” said Greene, who hit five home runs in 93 games last season but would’ve launched at least 10 homers had he played all his games at 11 different ballparks. “I should have hit it harder. It kind of comes down to that. I hit it good, but it’s just the park we play at. Sometimes it goes, sometimes it doesn’t. … If we go somewhere else, maybe it’s a home run, maybe it’s not. You never know.”
“That topic is such a big topic, especially around this ballpark and the time that I’ve been in this organization,” Hinch said. “I haven’t really thought a lot about it. We play 81 games here. It’s the same every day. We can complain about it. We can pout about it. We can wonder what if. But it’s our park. We need to play to the dimensions.”
The old Comerica Park dimensions were favorable for doubles and triples but unfavorable for home runs.
“Just the park,” Grossman said in June 2022, less than two months before the Tigers traded the slumping outfielder to the Atlanta Braves. “I tried to make some adjustments because of the park we play in, and it didn’t work for me, so I had to go back to who I was before.”
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The Tigers’ best player on the current roster, two-time All-Star shortstop Javier Báez, is a homer-or-strikeout hitter. He had mashed at least 20 homers in five consecutive 162-game seasons before signing a six-year, $140 million contract with the Tigers in December 2021.
In 2022, Báez had 17 homers: seven at home and 10 on the road.
He would have hit just 13 homers if he played all 144 of his games at Comerica Park, and he would have hit at least 25 homers if he played those games at 10 different ballparks: Arlington, Texas’ Globe Life Field; Chicago’s Guaranteed Rate Field; Cincinnati’s Great American Ball Park; Denver’s Coors Field; Houston’s Minute Maid Park; Milwaukee’s American Family Field; New York’s Yankee Stadium; Phoenix’s Chase Field; St. Petersburg, Florida’s Tropicana Field and Seattle’s T-Mobile Park.
From 2018-22, MLB players produced 5,685 batted balls projected to travel at least 420 feet. Only 23 of them turned into outs, and more than a third of those outs (eight), happened at Comerica Park.
Moving forward, those rare outs should have a better chance to be home runs.
Contact Evan Petzold at epetzold@freepress.com or follow him on Twitter @EvanPetzold.