Is it time to move the Safeco fences in?

By Blaidd Drwg

That is the question. I decided to take a look to see how much of a home road split there has been for the Mariners over the last few seasons; seasons that are stringing together one of the most inept offensive streaks in baseball history (we are talking dead ball era bad).

The first thing I noticed today was the park factor for Safeco this season is 100, which means that the most historically pitcher friendly park in the league is playing neutral this season, which is a huge surprise. Here are the splits for the Mariners between home and road over the last few seasons:

I picked 2004 as the starting point for this since that was the year I became a season ticket holder (has it really been that long) and I wanted to see if my memories of these teams fit the reality of the numbers. Looking at these numbers, the team was pretty consistent between 2004 and 2009 – they were about 12 – 17 % below league average hitting at home and hovering right around league average on the road, then they fall off a cliff offensively; interestingly enough in years 2 and 3 of the Z-era (he can’t take any credit or blame for year 1, those were mostly Bavasi’s players). The numbers indicate that there is a significant enough split between the home and road stats that maybe the Mariners should consider moving the fences in a few feet to try to generate more offense, although I doubt that it would at all help the current offense – they just can’t hit regardless of where they play. I also think that the honeymoon period for Z is long over – he came to Seattle with the reputation of being a great evaluator of talent. His Evaluation has driven the Mariners offense directly into the ground and produced a season and a half of the worst offense since WW2.

To answer the question, should the fences come in, I would say yes!