Offense At A Premium At Citi Field. Here’s Why.

The argument that Jose Iglesias’s post-game concert was the most impressive performance by a hitter at Citi Field has some merit.

Citi Field has historically been a desert for batters, Jody Gerut aside. Since 2021, hitters have posted a .694 OPS at the ballpark, 25 points lower than the league average.

Thanks to the wonderful work done by the Baseball Savant team, we can conclude that the venue is one of the most difficult parks to hit at. There’s a plethora of information that we can consult to measure this. We can look at home/away splits, weather effects, or expected production.

Savant’s ‘Park Factors‘ is a nifty tool that quantifies how much a stadium can impact a game’s offensive production by reducing statistical noise. Park Factors can indicate if a ballpark is favored towards pitchers or hitters, given the altitude, handedness preferences, and outfield dimensions.

For obvious reasons, Yankee Stadium grades out as favorable for left-handed hitters. Conversely, the Mariners’ T-Mobile Park presents an advantage to pitchers.

Below are the rolling Park Factors across all MLB stadiums for the last three seasons. 100 is the average; anything above 100 indicates a bias against hitters, and conversely, for hurlers.

Citi Field ranked as the eighth-worst ballpark for hitters from 2021 to 2024. In particular, the park was particularly detrimental towards triples and doubles.

In 2024, Batted Ball Events [BBEs] at the Mets’ home stadium travelled two feet below average, compared to similarly-hit balls. This is attributed to Citi’s elevation—or lack thereof. When a stadium’s altitude is higher, BBEs travel further; Citi only sits 10 feet above sea level. This effect explains the regular-season Home Run Derbies that frequently take place at the Castle-on-the-Hill that is Coors Field.

There’s another aspect at play that MLB.com’s Mike Petriello analyzed in a recent article. Using brand-new Baseball Savant tooling, he concluded that Citi Field’s wind has negatively impacted batted balls at the third-highest rate in the Majors.

That’s a known phenomenon with Citi Field’s batted balls that team officials and sabermetricians have studied for years. Many have theorized that the effect may be the result of the nearby LaGuardia Airport or the breeze from the nearby Flushing Bay.

Even the Mets’ head of baseball analytics, Ben Zauzmer, publicly acknowledged the conundrum in a 2021 interview with The Athletic:

“Citi Field definitely suppresses exit velocity,” head of analytics Ben Zauzmer said. “For any given player whose true talent is at a certain bar, you would expect the exit velocities to be lower at Citi Field than at the average park. And what’s fascinating about it is it appears to affect guys in all sorts of different situations.”

Jeff Sullivan of Fangraphs studied this trend back in 2018, concluding Citi Field lends itself to more infield pop-ups, a reduced BABIP, and decreased exit velocities. Since Jeff Sullivan is a certified smart man™️, I wanted to update the analysis he helped formulate.

A way to analyze this phenomenon is to examine how batted balls play in Citi Field compared to other ballparks. BABIP, a metric used to calculate batting average on balls in play, can be used as a proxy to show how batted balls play, either at a player level, at a team level, or at a stadium level. BABIP is calculated via the following equation:

Using the PyBaseball Python API, I calculated the Mets’ BABIP for the last 15 seasons, comparing their BABIP while playing at Citi Field and away. 2020 is excluded. The code can be found here, and yes, it is in Polars. If you know, you know. The Sickos Know.

Since Citi Field opened 15 years ago, the Mets have had a higher BABIP on the road in 11 seasons. 2008’s 41 points of difference in Home/Away BABIP was the largest gap. In 2024, the difference was 15 points.

The Mets haven’t been the only ones to struggle at Citi Field. BABIP’s historically trended lower at Citi for all Major League Teams.

These wide gaps in BABIP can be explained by the way different batted-ball buckets play at Citi Field.

Although the analysis is a bit outdated, Fangraphs‘ Steve Staude previously helped prove Sullivan’s aforementioned conclusion that line drives play worse-than-expected at Citi. Staude deducted that venues with lower line-drive percentages have lower BABIPs. Citi Field’s 3.9% LD rate ranks as the second-lowest among active ballparks.

Line drives aren’t alone. Citi Field ranks 7th in active ballparks in pop-up percentage; pop-up percentage has an inverse relationship to BABIP.

Since the inception of Citi Field, the Mets have been aware of the deficiencies surrounding their home ballpark and have made moves to fix them. The so-called “Great Wall of Flushing” limited round-trippers at the stadium and was torn down after the 2011 campaign. The club also moved in their center and right field fences multiple times to induce more offense at the park.

Oh, and signing the best hitter in the world with a career .305 BABIP won’t hurt either.

Overall, Citi Field is still a pitcher’s haven. Despite the plethora of Mets’ struggles at Citi Field, innate environmental influence has deadened offensive production at the venue.

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