The change in dimensions to Oriole Park’s dreaded left-field wall could give the O’s righty slugger a home run boost in 2025.
The O’s didn’t make a ton of splashy moves this offseason. But if you were to ask Ryan Mountcastle, he’d probably tell you that the Orioles’ best addition was by subtraction.
After three nightmarish years for Mountcastle and other right-handed sluggers, Walltimore is no more. At least, not in its previous form. The imposing left-field fence at Camden Yards, which had towered 13 feet high and sat as far as 398 feet from home plate at its deepest point, has been lowered and pulled in for 2025, now at a manageable height of 7-8 feet and a maximum distance of 376. The days of Statcast noting that a long shot to left would have been a home run in every MLB ballpark except Baltimore are over.
It’s not a complete return to the homer-happy Oriole Park dimensions of 2021 and earlier, but it should be a breath of fresh air for every hitter who saw their mammoth blasts to left field somehow fail to clear the colossal partition. In just three years, Walltimore swallowed up a staggering 137 fly balls that would have been home runs under the old dimensions.
Nobody suffered worse than Mountcastle, who lost 11 roundtrippers to the gargantuan blockade, the most of any hitter. It’s no surprise that his home run total has declined every year since his breakout 33-dinger campaign in 2021, reaching its nadir with just 13 long balls in 124 games last season. It’s a disappointing outcome for a guy whose prodigious power is supposed to be his calling card.
That’s not to say Mountcastle hasn’t been a contributor to the Orioles’ winning ways. He’s still posted an above-average OPS+ in every season of his career, and he’s turned himself into an excellent defender, tying for the AL lead in Defensive Runs Saved (8) among first basemen last year. He’s a perfectly fine player.
But when O’s fans see Ryan Mountcastle, what they expect to see is jaw-dropping moon shots, and those have been too few and far between in recent years. Is this the year that his power numbers skyrocket once again? Let’s see what ZiPS projects for his home run total.
ZiPS projection: 128 G, 526 PA, 18 HR, .257/.304/.424, 1.2 WAR
The case for the over
I mean…you heard that Walltimore is dead, right? The change in the left-field dimensions opens up a whole new world for Mountcastle’s power stroke. “[I’m] excited,” he told the media in February. “It’s a good feeling knowing that you can pull the ball again and get good results out of it.” One can’t help but wonder if the 2022-24 dimensions not only dampened Mountcastle’s statistics but also ruined his confidence, causing him to change his swing or his plate approach for the worse. Now he can go back to doing what he does best.
It will also help if Mountcastle can stay on the field a little bit more. He’s missed at least 30 games to injury in each of the last two seasons, depressing his overall stats. If he can stay fully healthy this year, then swatting more than 18 home runs is easily attainable.
The case for the under
As fun as it is to assume that Mountcastle will magically return to the 30+ homer form that he flashed before Walltimore so rudely intruded into his life, it might not be that simple. MLB.com’s Mike Petriello crunched the numbers and found that of Mountcastle’s 11 “robbed” home runs over the last three years, only six would have been dingers under the new 2025 dimensions. That’s an average of just two a year. This isn’t the old Oriole Park bandbox that Mountcastle so enjoyed in 2021.
There’s also the very real possibility that Mountcastle won’t spend the whole season as an Oriole. He has just two years before free agency and top prospect Coby Mayo — a fellow right-handed slugger with arguably even more raw power than Mountcastle — is waiting for a major league spot, perhaps at first base. It wouldn’t be a shock if the O’s traded Mountcastle this season before he reaches the 18-homer mark.