Is Yankee Stadium a Lefty-Friendly Ballpark?

Photo Credit: AP Photo/Mary Altaffer

Yankee Stadium is well known for the short porch in right field. In fact, the right field in Yankee Stadium is closer to home plate than in any other ballpark, extending from right-center field to the short porch near the right field foul pole.

Can we quantify the advantage of being left-handed in Yankees Stadium? To find out, I’ll take a look at the relative performance of both right-handed and left-handed batters and pitchers in Yankee Stadium (YS) and compare those numbers to the league as a whole.

Table 1: League-Wide and Yankee Stadium (YS) wOBAs against RHPs and LHPs since 2015 (Statcast)

Table 2: League-Wide and Yankee Stadium normalized wOBACon 3-year rolling average (Baseball Savant)

As evident from Table 1, lefty pitchers outperform righty pitchers by 3 wOBA-points in Yankee Stadium, whereas league-wide, righty pitchers outperform lefty pitchers by 2 wOBA-points.

Righty batters, however, outproduce lefty batters by 4% in Yankee Stadium, despite being on par with lefty batters league-wide. (Seen in Table 2 above)

Based on this analysis, we can conclude that Yankee Stadium is a pitcher-friendly park for left-handed pitchers and a batter-friendly park against right-handed pitchers.