The Kansas City Royals are moving in fences at Kauffman Stadium in an effort to make it a more hitter-friendly ballpark, the team announced on Tuesday (January 13, 2026) via MLB.com.
Both the left- and right-field walls will be moved in nine to 10 feet, beginning close to the foul poles and tapering toward center field, which will stay at 410 feet from home plate, while the wall height will be lowered from 10 feet to 8 1/2 feet in most places. The change will also add to Kauffman Stadium's total capacity, with an additional 150 seats in left field and 80 drink-rail seats being implemented.
A team-provided diagram showed the left- and right-field corners at 347 and 344 feet, respectively, nine feet shorter than their current dimensions. The left and right field walls will also be nine feet closer at 364 feet, while the left-center and right-center fields will be 10 feet closer at 379 feet.
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Key factors in Petco Park working against hitters:
Marine Layer & Wind:
Cool, dense air from the Pacific Ocean knocks down fly balls and makes pitches break more.
Deep Outfield:
The dimensions, particularly the 402-foot power alleys, are large, making extra-base hits harder to come by.
Personal opinion but I wish they would. Tired of being warning track champions
we already pushed the walls in
I would love to a be a little more neutral of a park than such an extreme pitchers park. I know past players like HaSeong Kim would have doubled his homerun totals if the walls were even 5 ft closer. I’ve never seen a team hit so many fly balls right to the top of the wall as we did last year.
I don’t remember the visitors having trouble hitting HRs here.
They did. Can’t do anything about the marine layer though.
Replace the warning track with a trampoline.
Do people not realize that doing so would have a negative impact on our pitching?
Petco is already a HR-friendly park, especially down the left field line. Moving in the fences would just give base hits even less room to land and turn it into a bootleg Yankee Stadium
Park plays pretty neutral already.
How about getting players who can actually hit home runs.
This doesn’t mean it will be more of a hitters park. Yes there will be more home runs but it also shrinks the outfield for the defense so more pop outs to short outfield and less doubles and triples off the wall. Don’t believe me Vinnie Pasquintino wrote a long social media post about it.
“Please don’t read this is you don’t care. This is too long and after I wrote it I felt dumb but I’ll still put it out there. At the end of the day our job is go win games that’s it. I’m just going to respond like an adult. I’m very curious how this is going to play out in multiple ways. And honestly mostly from a data perspective (this hits close to home because I’m about to go into a room and hear how awful I am). The K was the 6th most hitter friendly ballpark according to the park factor. Will moving the fences in make this better or worse? Hitters like hitting at the K because the visuals are nice but everyone also agrees it’s been a pitchers park forever. What this means is that you can’t hit cheap homers. That’s literally all a hitter saying a park is a hitters park or not means. But the data firmly supports it being a hitters paradise because you can get more singles doubles and triples. Will the park factor actually go down if it’s more of a neutral park because there will be less triples even if there is an uptick in home runs? What will this mean for WRC+, we get punished with this stat for playing at the K now. So what will happen? More home runs = more runs produced but if the park factor goes down so does the punishment for probably the most important stat in our game from an individual standpoint. All in all I truly believe hitters/pitchers alike just want fairness but we play one of the only sports where the field size changes and I think that’s one of the cooler things about our game. I just rambled a lot but I think it’s cool the Royals were willing to make these changes to make it more of a neutral ballpark”
Didnt we do this already?
Bringing in the fences does not automatically turn a park into “hitter friendly.” It will increase HRs, but that does not mean more overall offense. When Petco Park moved the fences in before 2013, the HR rate went up, but hits and total runs barely changed
Why? Because there is less field for balls to fall in…
Take Coors Field. It is not a hitter’s park *just* because of altitude. The MLB has mostly neutralized the baseball itself with humidors. What hasn’t been neutralized is massive field Coors has. It was originally built extra large to compensate for thin air before the advent of the humidor. So its fair territory is over 8k sq ft, roughly 7%, larger than Petco’s
That extra OF space means more balls drop for hits, longer innings, and more runs. Petco has less of that space, so fewer balls turn into hits. Moving fences in agin might add HRs, but it won’t suddenly create more hits
No !!!! We are a pitchers friendly park