I understand the new Comiskey Park now under construction in Chicago will be the only baseball stadium in the major leagues with home plate in the northwest corner, rather than the southwest. Why are all ballparks oriented this way? Don’t the owners of the White Sox care that they’re going to have the only exception? –Jerry, Chicago
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Right field is the “sun field” in most major league ballparks because the right fielder must look into the sun when catching fly balls during afternoon games. This is one reason (though not the most important one) that most clubs put a stronger defensive player in right field than in left. Making left field the sun field, some purists claim, will throw off the game’s subtle balances, create havoc in the outfield, and, to hear some tell it, hasten the decline of the West.
The reason home plate is oriented the way it is, in any case, has nothing to do with the outfielders. It’s meant to help the batter. If the plate were on the east side of the ballpark, the batter would be facing west, meaning he’d have the afternoon sun in his eyes. Not only would his batting average suffer, he might fail to duck next time a wild pitch came screaming toward his noggin. Putting home in the southwest or northwest corner eliminates this problem.
The Whites, counterrevolutionaries who fought the Reds in the period 1918-1920, took their name from the White Guards, a Finnish police force organized in 1906 to fight subversives. “The origin of the term ‘White Guards’ is connected with the traditional symbolism of the color white as the color of the supporters of ‘legitimate’ law and order,” the GSE notes. Sounds like it wasn’t just in the old west that the alleged good guys wore white hats.
