Think about what you know about ballparks and which ones are conducive to hitting home runs. Then think about how that might affect the NLDS between the Dodgers and Phillies when it moves to Los Angeles for Game 3 on Wednesday, with the home team looking to complete a sweep.
The Yankees, who play in a ballpark universally (if somewhat incorrectly) believed to be a home run haven, saw exactly one more home run hit or allowed in their regular-season home games (225) than in their road games (224). The Rockies, who famously play a mile high, witnessed 23 more homers in home games. For the A’s, who moved into a Minor League park that ended up being quite hitter-friendly, it was 19 more at home.
That gives you some context. Now, try this one on for size: The Dodgers, who play in one of the most legendarily pitcher-friendly parks, had 89 more homers happen in their regular-season home games (254) than on the road (165). (There were also five more at home against the Reds in the two-game Wild Card Series, though we’re sticking to regular season here.)
It’s the largest gap in the Majors this year by nearly twice as many as the second-place Orioles, who experienced 48 more combined homers at home than the road. Forget just this year: It’s the 11th-largest gap dating back to the beginning of the Divisional Era in 1969, so we’re talking thousands of team-seasons. Four of the 10 higher than this Los Angeles year came at pre-humidor Coors Field; three more were at an Atlanta park lovingly referred to as “the Launching Pad.” One of them was so egregious it spurred the home Orioles to literally cut a giant chunk out of their left field in an attempt to preserve their pitchers’ sanity.
So much for the pitchers’ park of Koufax, Hershiser, and (early) Kershaw, apparently. What in the name of Don Drysdale is going on here?
It is, by raw totals and park factor, the best home run park in baseball this year, and it is, importantly, not just because the Dodgers have Shohei Ohtani and Freddie Freeman in their powerful lineup. Freeman hit more homers on the road, for one thing, but mostly it’s that while the home team does indeed hit more dingers at Dodger Stadium than they do on the road, the home pitchers also allow more homers there, too – to a nearly equal degree.
Think about it this way: Those 254 combined homers that fans saw at Dodger Stadium was the most of any park. The 165 combined homers that you’d have seen in Dodger games on the road was second-least, ahead of only PNC Park in Pittsburgh. Given that they took the same roster on the road with them, it’s hard to argue that’s a talent thing, and not a ballpark thing.
Some of it is maybe a little fluky, a little odd, like how outfielder Andy Pages hit 16 consecutive homers at Dodger Stadium this season, not managing a single road blast for four full months between April 23 at Wrigley Field and Aug. 21 at Coors Field. (“Obviously, I’m comfortable [at Dodger Stadium], but I’m very comfortable at other stadiums, too,” Pages told Dodger Insider after another home-field home run in late August, in a not-terribly-convincing attempt to explain what was happening.)
Pages (+11 homers on the road), Max Muncy (also +11, with 15 at home and four away), and Mookie Betts (+10, with 15 at home vs. five away) were the biggest beneficiaries, but they’re also three distinct hitters without terribly much in common, stylistically. It’s not even the same issue, anyway; in Muncy’s case, he made considerably more contact at home (17% strikeout rate, vs. 26% on the road), but for Betts, it was about getting the ball in the air a lot more at home (51% of batted balls) than away (41%). For Will Smith, who had seven additional homers at home, it was that he struck out a little less and pulled the ball a lot more.
That could be about home field comfort for the hitting team, but remember again: That wouldn’t do much to explain how pitchers Tony Gonsolin, Tyler Glasnow, Landon Knack, Clayton Kershaw, Ben Casparius, Blake Treinen, and Anthony Banda all allowed at least four additional homers in the home whites than they did on the road.
Or, consider ace Yoshinobu Yamamoto, who allowed an equal seven homers at home and on the road. That may sound like no difference at all, and it’s not, until you realize this: He faced 130 additional batters away from home.
What, then, is happening to the park that was once considered a pitchers’ haven?
First, there’s this: Dodger Stadium hasn’t always been the pitchers’ park you remember, and it certainly hasn’t been that in quite some time. Only two parks have shorter center fields than Los Angeles’ 396 feet, and no fence there is higher than 8 feet tall, making it on average one of the shortest fence fields in the game. By Statcast’s park factors, Dodger Stadium has been a near-average or better home run park continuously dating back to 2013 – before which, yes, it was a poor home run field for a number of years.
But not always. Using Seamheads park factors that predate Statcast’s, it’s true that in the Koufax/Drysdale heyday of the 1960s, Dodger Stadium was indeed a wildly extreme home run suppressing field. It just didn’t always stay that way, and it was actually quite a good place to hit a homer in the late 1970s and early 1980s – in 1979, it was actually one of the best home run fields in the game – before dropping back into pitcher-friendly territory for most of the 1990s, and then sort of up-and-down for most of the 21st century before the current homer-friendly run.
But as far as what’s made 2025 such an outlier even beyond that, well, it’s not quite clear.
Since new ownership took over in 2012, a large number of renovations and upgrades have been made to the park, including as recently as this past winter, when the entire field was dug out to make for a large update to the home clubhouse. It’s hard to think it’s a coincidence that’s all happened while the park has become more friendly to homers, but most of those have come behind the scenes – other than some decrease in foul territory, no changes have been made to the fence distances or heights – and Statcast suggests there’s been little meaningful change in how the ball carries. There’s not much difference between day or night here, either. There’s some evidence that machines like the Trajekt, which teams have only at home, do help hitters, but again, that doesn’t explain the pitcher part of it.
Really, it’s going to come down to these three questions.
1) Are there more balls hit there that could be home runs?
There’s no slug on the ground, as modern hitting coaches love to say, so to test that out, let’s see if there’s simply more of the type of balls hit that could be homers there. We’ll use a shorthand here: Since 86% of homers are hit at 100 mph or more and between 12° and 48° of launch angle, is there something about the park that creates those? That is a park factor, after all; we discussed earlier in the year that part of what makes Seattle’s T-Mobile Park such a challenge is that it creates strikeouts.
The answer here: Not really. There were 563 such homer-adjacent balls hit in Dodger Stadium, which was seventh-most, similar to the decidedly not-a-home-run-park Citi Field. In Dodger games on the road, there were 545 such balls, which is to say: about the same. It’s probably not this.
2) Do more of those balls just become homers?
Sure do. Take those homer-potential batted balls again, the 100+ mph, between 12° and 48°, the range where nearly nine of every 10 homers live.
As we just said, those balls didn’t happen more or less at Dodger Stadium. But while 23% of them became homers on the road, 35% of them became homers at home. If that doesn’t sound like a lot, the gap there is 79 more homers – which is almost all of the 89-homer gap we started with.
The “why” here gets confusing. Sure, Los Angeles is warmer than most places, but this was a comparatively cooler summer there than most. Wind isn’t really a factor there, most of the time, and the distance – 403 feet on average at home and away, neither a standout number – tracks with the Statcast factors that show little about the ball carrying better. Again, though, this has been happening in some form for many years, and we know that multiple improvements to the park have been made. Too many, perhaps, to pinpoint this to just one thing.
3) Are there more ‘cheap’ homers?
There were 32 homers hit at less than 100 mph at Dodger Stadium, again using a shorthand we just invented for “cheaply hit homer.” Seven parks had more. There were 22 such homers hit in Dodger games on the road, so it’s this a little, but not a ton.
So, what did we learn here? Other than that it’s continued to happen in October, with five homers in two games at Dodger Stadium and just one in two games in Philadelphia?
It’s unsatisfying to not have a clear, obvious reason. On the other hand, while 2025 is a bit of an outlier, this isn’t something that just started happening, either. Dodger Stadium, the park that Koufax and his successors once made synonymous with “pitching,” has been a pretty great home run park for nearly a decade now. The reputation of the 1960s just never really changed to reflect it.
