Atlanta Braves franchise best outfielders: No. 4 Wally Berger

The effect of Braves Field

When Braves Field opened, J.C. O’Leary, writing for the Boston Globe, called it the finest baseball park in the world. If nothing else, it was big, as in massive. The foul line makers read 375 feet, dead-center was 440 feet and the fence in right-center was 520 feet away.

Braves Field was always an awful place to hit home runs. Clem’s Baseball Blog gives details. I added links to images from Digital Ballparks to the quotes to try to show what he described

"In almost every year from the late 1920s until the early 1940s, the outfield dimensions changed, but much uncertainty remains over the exact sequence of these changes . . . . . . there was usually a strong wind blowing in from center field, making it very hard to hit the ball very far. . . . the stadium was situated rather close to the Charles River, which was a sort of funnel for ocean breezes . . . . . . (it sat) right next to a major railroad switching yard. . . smoke from the locomotives often clouded the field, so they planted a row of fir trees to block this unsightliness, to little avail . ."

After Babe Ruth made home runs popular, the club moved the fences in but found other teams hitting more homers than the Braves, so they moved them back.

Records are non-existent, so we don’t know precisely when that happened, but references indicate both moves occurred before 1930.

We do know the one-year park factors for Braves’ field and that it ranked in the bottom three in the league nine times in 14 years.