The Warning Track Power of Pittsburgh Pirates Catcher Rod Barajas

Something started bothering us after a recent post, and as you guessed it, Rod Barajas is involved.  We were curious if the home run numbers of Rod Barajas truly were impacted by the deep fences at PNC Park?  We heard Pittsburgh Pirates Senior Vice President and General Manager talk about it recently.

So we decided to do some research.  The HR/FB rate for Rod Barajas over his career has nearly reached a career low in 2012.

We first looked at Fan Graphs first to see what we could dig up on those fly balls Barajas is hitting.  The more we thought about it, the more we felt that there were a few ways to find out some more.  We wanted to see every out Pirates catcher Rod Barajas has made this season.

The perfect spot for such analysis was Fox.  Here is the link if you want to check it out yourself.

AT&T ParK:  (in play) 340 feet to the wall ( out)

Busch:  (in play) 350 feet ( out )

Coors Field:  ( in play )  413 feet  ( out ) God that must have drove Timmy Neverett off the edge.

Great American:  320 and 380 feet weren’t enough.

The House of Horrors:  enough said

Camden Yards:  340 feet didn’t get it done, we witnessed this one–it sucked.

PNC Park: 380, 360, 340, 360, 360, 360, 360, 380, 373, 351, 370, and another 370, damn….

Progressive:  Look really close down that left field line…

Turner:  Wow.  Greg Brown almost had a stroke.

After looking at these numbers, one would have to believe Rod Barajas is ready to put Pittsburgh in the rear view mirror.   But Rod mentioned he would come back for less money.

Wonder why?

PNC Park is swallowing his power numbers regularly.