PORT ST. LUCIE — I am standing square in the heart of the abyss, inside that fearsome, mystical greensward that swallowed baseballs across the past three years. Remember the old saying about Willie Mays’ glove when he played at the Polo Grounds? That it was the place where triples went to die?
This is where home runs have gone to die.
“When you’ve hit enough home runs,” Jason Bay said the other day, “you have a reasonably good idea of what they feel like off the bat. The last couple of years, though, you’d hit the ball the same way and think, ‘Yeah. That’s a double.’ And sometimes, it wouldn’t even be enough to be a double. It’d just die in someone’s glove.”
Back home, inside the real Citi Field, workers have spent the winter shoving the fences forward, transforming the Mets’ home field from a pitcher’s paradise into a hitter’s haven. You’ve read all about the new dimensions. And to an untrained eye just reading the numbers, it definitely seems significant.
That old crazy patch in right-center field that used to sit 415 feet away — that seemed like a cruel joke played by the Mets’ ownership on David Wright since that’s where he used to do his most damage? It’ll still take a poke, but it’s only 398 feet away now.
Left-center, which Bay said sometimes seemed like it was located in Staten Island? Was 371. Now 358 — a familiar number to Mets fans who remember it as a part of Shea Stadium’s timeless dimensions of 338-358-371-396-410-396-371-358-338. So yes: It sounds cozier
Only here, 1,194 miles south, you can get a genuine taste of just how different the park will really be. Here, at Digital Domain Park — whose main field, by the way, inexplicably still uses the old Shea dimensions — the auxiliary field that sits directly beyond the main diamond’s centerfield wall has been transformed into a laboratory.
And I’m in the middle of that lab. I’m standing behind the 358-foot sign, which hangs on one wire fence covered in a dark-colored tarpaulin. And I’m standing in front of another wire fence which represents where the old fence once stood (and, not incidentally, remains 16-feet high, the way the old fence was; in new jack Citi, the fence will be eight feet high all the way around).
How vast is it? Put it this way: You could drive a couple of Escalades side-by-side and still have room for a few Harleys. It is wider than a hotel concourse. Stepping it off heel-to-toe, it took 10 paces of my size 13 Puma Clydes to make it from front to back.
“Comparatively,” catcher Josh Thole said, “it feels like you can reach out and touch the fence.”
That was the idea, Terry Collins insists. They kept the old fences up for a reason, and he saw the results the first day the early-reporting regulars took live batting practice.
“After a while,” Collins said, “I took a walk out there, and there’s like a dozen baseballs lying in that area between the fences, home runs now that would’ve been something else before.”
Collins told his coaches, “Make sure you walk the guys back this way, so they can see those baseballs lying on the grass. Let them see what they’re going to be in for once we get them back home.”
Presumably, he told Dan Warthen to take his pitchers back along a different route.
By way of Tulsa, perhaps.
“Pitchers are going to pitch to their strengths anyway,” said Thole, whose job description this year will include trying to mask his own excitement as a man who hits for a living while handing a baseball back to Mike Pelfrey/Johan Santana/R.A. Dickey after Mike Stanton/Freddie Freeman/Chase Utley sneaks a sinker/change-up/knuckler over a fence this year that would have been a long single/clean double/routine flyball last year.
“It’s going to be a fair park. I think we can agree on that.”
We’ll see when we continue this conversation back in Flushing. For now, in Florida, you have a wide-eyed crew of hitters who practically sprint to the auxiliary field now, whose eyes light up at the new fences, whose bats seem delighted to be given new life in a place where they used to be laid to rest.