If you want to know what cheap home run is,the original distance in yankee stadium right field was 290 feet.Now that is a cheap home run.
Its a cheap home run....but ONLY if you bat left-handed or can muster enough pwer as a right handed hitter to drive it for a opposite field home run. The latter is not easy to do at all.
Hmm. Some of that might vary hitter to hitter. When MMP opened Jeff Bagwell said he wished the crawford boxes were down the right field line and Ken Griffy was upset Safeco fences were so short in right instead of left. Perhaps those are isolated. My point initially was that not EVERY home run hit there is cheap. Line Drives hit to the crawford boxes are going to be out of any park considering they are almost 30 feet off the ground when someone catches them
This is an excellent point. The elevation of the wall the ball has to clear to get out is RARELY taken into consideration...in Yankee Stadium, that wall is about 4 feet high in right field. In Fenway, it's about the same. In MMP, it's 19 feet high down the LF line...it's 25 feet high in left center.
All I can say (again) is give it time. Its only been 5 years... "10-run" field is still fresh one everybody's mind. Hardly anybody talks about the Metrodome roof (a topic of heated controversy, since the ball is the same color and the OFers have trouble seeing)... hardly anybody talks about the semi-bandbox's in Cleveland and Baltimore anymore either. As the park continues to play fair (which it has, the last 4 years), both teams and fans will slowly realize that people can pitch/hit/play there with the same normalcy as other places... and then the media will follow suit.