RIP Walltimore 2022-2024 - The Orioles Announce They Will Renovate And Move In The Gigantic Left Field Wall For The 2025 Season
Righties and all the whiney crybabies on the Yankees rejoice! Mike Elias spoke with the media today and announced that the massive left field wall in Camden Yards known as "Walltimore" will be moving in a little bit ahead of the 2025 season. Literally every right handed hitter who has played in Baltimore since 2022 could be heard screaming with joy. As a fan, I thought it worked well for the Orioles early on but man did it seem like the O's were getting robbed several times late in the season, including the playoffs. It will be much more neutral going forward and that seems like a positive for the O's. The move in 2022 was probably a little too much, but Elias said this is an overcorrection and it will help level the playing field.
You can see the rendering above that it's being pulled in and lowered, I thought it would be fine with the distance if they lowered the fence but they are doing both. Some spots are being brought in as little as 9 feet and as much as 20 feet, it's also being lowered from 13 feet to 8 feet making home run robberies possible. Elias called it a "happy medium" for the ball club, you'd assume a few more home runs will fly out of there at the expense of O's pitchers and a few more O's righties will be able to put some homers out there, but overall I think it will help this club.
The righties absolutely hated this wall, like fucking HATED it. Trey Mancini was very open about how awful it was in 2022, Austin Hays expressed some displeasure with it, Aaron Judge had some comments about it, as did Aaron Boone. We had Ryan Mountcastle on our podcast and he legit rolled his eyes when we asked him about it, no one will be happier than Mounty when this season starts and he sees that he doesn't have to hit it to Pickles for it to be a homer to LF.
Elias said this move isn't to try and persuade right handed hitters to come here, just said it's an overcorrection and it was "more than we bargained for".
"We didn’t like the degree to which this had become a distraction in many ways. I know the pitchers enjoyed it, but for our right-handed hitters in particular – our left-handed hitters, too – aspects of this were a little severe."
It 100% was a distraction to the righties when you got in that box. It was only 13 feet high but it looked 113 feet, it for sure had a mental hold on some of these guys and they let their frustrations be known. I do like that Elias and company are willing to admit this didn't work how they'd hope and found a compromise. It's not a mess up by any means, but they tried something and saw that it didn't work and they are fixing it, I can get down with that. It's still going to be a good shot to get it out in right, but it will also help with the defense. Colton Cowser is good enough to cover all of that ground out there, he's a Gold Glove nominee for a reason, but it's basically like having 2 center fields out there, it's a ton of ground. But it will be nice to see some of the production from the righties comeback, namely Ryan Mountcastle and Coby Mayo. Now opposing announcers will have to find something else to bitch about!
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PS.
They should fill the gap with water and let us crab there, who says no?