Non uniform playing areas: where's the fairness?

This has been a recurring theme since my first Radical Baseball document in 2006, two years before it became the first post on this blog:

Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Radical Baseball June 9, 2006

2. The Real scandal of the last 16 years: propagation of non-uniform playing areas.

It’s not steroids. It’s the fences.  Baseball is the only American team sport in which the playing area is not uniform ... how come baseball gets away with it? Baseball does not merely get away with it. It’s considered cute, charming, traditional, blah, blah, blah. Here’s the real travesty: the non-uniform playing area perverts baseball’s most cherished event: the home run. It undermines the very integrity of the game that is supposedly threatened by steroid use. ...  

in some cases a fly ball can travel 50% further than a home run and be an out. The distances to the barriers are not just different from park to park but they are different in some parts of the outfield in the same park. A home run should reward the batter for hitting a fly ball over a barrier and for that to be fair and meaningful the barrier should be the same distance and the same height in every direction in every park. That’s pretty basic stuff ... 

Yes, this should also apply to foul territory.
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Thursday, September 29, 2011
Red Sox: you live by the wall, you die by the wall.

Tampa Rays park left field corner:

Was the wall always much closer and much lower than just a few feet further into fair territory or was that done to make Red Sox fans suffer more?  Evan Longoria's wining hit was really a double, not a homer.  That configuration is a joke, maybe intended to have hypocritical Red Sox fans complain.  You live by the wall, you die by the wall.

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In Sunday's Yankee-Oriole tournament game in Baltimore a play that did not decide the game as Longoria's did a year before reminded me of the absurdity of baseball fields.  In Camdem Yards Baltimore there is essentially an alley in foul territory near the right field foul pole.  Such an indentation does not exist in left.  I understand that there is a big entrance to some utility room back there.  What I do not understand is why that area is not fenced off from play.  A simple continuation of the line of the structure that defines the playing area would do it.

Late in the game Yankee batter Curtis Granderson pulled a long fly ball into that Bermuda triangle, which I had never noticed.  The Baltimore right fielder disappeared to catch the ball.  Replays from various angles showed that he flinched, apparently thinking that the ball would hit the edge of the indented wall and change direction.

Granderson was retired on a ball that should not have been in play and which I doubt would have been in play in any other ball park.

Where's the fairness?  What kind of idiot thinks that's charming?  Many fans at the game could not even see the ball being caught.  That's entertainment?

Americans have a genuine, deeply held sense of fairness.  We also have a blind spot for tradition and folk lore, especially as they apply to the national pastime.  There is an inherent conflict, which most baseball fans refuse to even acknowledge.  They just insist that nothing should change.

Do fans really want the playing areas to be different or do they simply want them to look different?  What if my idea was implemented but each park was decorated to make it look distinctive, maybe even appear more different than now?  Fairness would be established and sensibilities considered.