Surprisingly Fun Way to Waste Time

This is a map of Jason Bay’s home runs, triples, doubles and fly outs hit in Citi Field this year, imposed onto an outline of Shea Stadium. (Home runs are dark blue, triples are blue, double are light blue, and fly outs are orange.) I made it on this website here — this is the link — which takes MLB Gameday info and lets you map it onto different ballparks. You can take any hitter’s balls put in play in one park, and map them onto another park, or take any pitcher’s balls in play against in one park, and map them onto another. I don’t know how accurate the mapping is, but it’s sure fun to mess around with.

I guess the bad news from the above map is that none of Jason Bay’s fly outs and triples from this season would have left Shea Stadium, so his struggles are probably not explained by the park as much as his swing. (Though the park could be influencing his swing. Park effects and maps such as this one don’t account for things like that . . . so there’s still hope?) The slightly better but still depressing news is that looking at David Wright’s seasons at Citi Field, you can spot a few triples and flyouts that might have left Shea. But not that many.

That’s depressing though, and there are plenty of ways to have fun with this gadget that don’t involve the Mets’ struggling sluggers. Like, for example, mapping the Yankees’ home runs in Yankee Stadium onto Petco Park:

Take that, Granderson and Cano.