Oakland Park Baseball

Baseball=Life wrote:hockey suck balls compared to baseball.

I bet you have never played ice hockey. A damn shame.

Anyway, what are the dimensions of defremery park?? I assume there is a fence with all these homeruns.

Depends on who you ask.

Hey, I'm just giving the ranges... no ne argue this for now.... if you pretend to know for sure, you're wrong.

LF- 215-260
CF-240-285
RF-205-230

The catch is that there is a 20 foof wall (?) in left.

left field is nowhere near 260.

When you gauge LF at DeFremery, you cannot measure from home plate to the LF fence. Due to the heighth of the LF fence, it is impossible for the ball to land anywhere near the fence itself---rather, the closest it can really land is in the middle of the street. So you have to add the distance from the LF fence to the middle of the street. Actually, most HRs make it toward the other side of the street, so even further. The ball doesn't reach the 10' high mark (a standard HR fence heighth) until well beyond the actual LF fence.

so how fast is the pitching?

Whatever you want. You get to tell the pitcher.

You know, these rules aren't THAT odd... its similar to the rules used by the original baseball teams.

Ok, the 1860s, but still!

And can someone bring a mesuring tape and do it themselves? please.

Why bother with tape when there are satellite photos to measure from?

Currently available resolution is not good enough to get accurate numbers. Measuring by hand on the ground should be considered the final word on this. With a good long tape measure you can reasonably expect an accuracy of +/- 2ft.
Anyway, Scott made the excellent point that on a satellite image you can't see how tall the fence is, which makes a pretty big difference.

The final word on the fence distances could come from a laser measuring device. I know appraisers use them, and the city has some for topograhical purposes. Perhaps (and believe me, it's a loooooooong shot) the tool lending library in Berkeley has one. If we could get it, it would clear up the issue for sure, since rolling measuring devices are innacurate unless on flat ground, and there have been tape measuring discrepancies.

Why re-invent the wheel ? I use Google Earth, the free satellite mapping program you can download http://earth.google.com

It has a measuring tool in the "TOOL"section where you pick a starting point and then drag a straight line to and end point ie; start @ home plate and drag the line to the fence line. Don't worry if you have a crappy monitor. It is very accurate for measuring distances from inches to miles or (centimeters to kilometers for those of you who don't like the complicated yet lovable American system of measurements). If you have doubts of its'accuracy, do what I did and setup a control. If you look at any football field on the map (Berkeley HS, Laney College, Cal Memorial Stadium), and measure from end zone to end zone you will get 100 yds (from the beginning of the endzones) or very close to it within a yard or two depending on how steady your hand is. So you say a football field is easier to measure than a baseball field. Then fly over to the Coliseum where the stated measurements are (L) 330, (C) 440, (R) 330. You can use your favorite pro park if you like... just look up the dimensons for your reference. After playing with the measuring tool on known distances, you should be satisfied that you can measure our fields. I am quite satisfied with my previous measurements that I've posted recently. I admit that the first attempts where I used a ruler on my screen along with the scale provided by the image was not the best, but even that measurement was only off by a few feet.

and... we're not measuring the fences... just the distance from home plate to the fence. You'd have to do a little trigonometry to figure the true distance a ball was hit at DeFremery considering the height and angle of flight of the ball

Whenever a HR leaves DeFremery it's an amazing moment......... hahahaha no but I remember once popping up to the left side and routinely running down the firstbaseline and Anthony had to tell me to keep going because it had left the yard, hahahahha ridiculous. I thought it was a definite fly out.

An interesting question would be what portion of HRs there are definite out pop-outs elsewhere? Some HRs I've seen at DeFremery were crushed..... gone anywhere.

Scott, I'm gonna have to dispute that. Many, many are the times we have seen really well hit balls result in nothing but a loud out to LF at Curt Flood. There has been only one HR there so far, and we have played so many games there. I doubt my grand slam last Sunday would have made it. Maybe, but I doubt it.