Measuring the fences is not hard
In the world of baseball field care, there are difficult tasks, like drying a field, and there are easy ones, like measuring the fences.
I helped my dad measure them in high school. At Hamilton Field, either he and I or my brother and I, we'd stand at home plate with a large tape measure. How large? Say, 200 feet. Then one person would hold the loose end at home plate, and the other would unroll the tape measure and walk directly toward a specific point in the outfield fence. When the measure ran out of tape, the person at home plate would run to that spot, and the process would continue until the walker reached the fence. Then we'd have our distance.
The management of the Washington Nationals, however, apparently employ a different approach at RFK Stadium. They guess. Apparently. I'm having trouble thinking of another method that would get them the results they had.
The team's results turned out last week to be wrong, off by a sizeable amount. First, two Washington Post reporters found that the left-center 380 mark was actually about 394 feet from the plate. How did they measure? Large tape measure. Team officials forced them to stop before they could measure any more distances. But the very next day, the team brought in a surveyor. Turned out both left-center and right-center were wrong. And Jose Guillen conducted an investigation of his own.
