What No One Knows About Fantasy Baseball

Jose Reyes. David Wright. Carlos Beltran.

They all get to deal with high outfield walls, all the way around, at their new place. Don't expect much help for home runs there.

C.C. Sabathia. Mariano Rivera. Joba Chamberlain.

These guys all have 20 feet of less foul ground behind home plate to work with in half of their games this year. You're crazy if you don't think that will add up to extra pitches and stress.

Johan Santana. Francisco Rodriguez. John Maine.

The blue pitchers will be dealing with all kinds of nooks and crannies that could lead to extra base opportunities in the outfield. It's also going to have significantly different wind patterns, given how it's, well, not in the same place as to old hole. Could play a lot of havoc with breaking pitches.

Mark Teixeria. Alex Rodriguez (assuming he ever comes back). Derek Jeter.

While the new place does have less foul ground near home plate, it does have a little more in the outfield. The place also has a very different outfield configruation and batters eye, since Monument Park has moved.

The point? I was in Northern California when Pac Bell opened. On its first day, balls flew out of the park in a 6-5 Dodgers win, with noted power hitter Kevin Elser (88 home runs in 13 years) going yard three times. The locals were convinced they had a bandbox. Of course, they didn't, and don't; Pac Bell is one of the top five pitchers' parks in the majors. In the first game at Petco, Marques Grissom, of the career .415 slugging percentage, was the only man to go deep in a 4-3 home win.

Every new stadium architect tells you that their place will play "fair", neither helping not hurting the hitter or pitcher, respectively. And they all lie, especially in the modern era, where you can make an ungodly amount of cabbage charging rich people a lot of money to sit close enough so that a line drive in the game they aren't watching could kill them.

If and when you take these guys, all you can hope is that their new yards play like their old ones, because that's the only basis for comparison you have to go to. And considering that, depending on how infested your league is with Mets and Yankee Fan, all of the guys that I just named will go in the first ten rounds. Or much, much less.

Happy drafting!