*Baseball’s Home Run Derby takes place tonight in Atlanta…weather can have quite an impact on the distance baseballs can travel…a surprising recent finding regarding winds*
Paul Dorian
Overview
The All-Star break has arrived for big-league baseball which always features a Home Run Derby that’ll take place this evening in Atlanta, Georgia and the All-Star game will be played on Tuesday night. The weather looks quite hot and humid both for tonight’s Home Run Derby and tomorrow’s game and Tuesday can feature scattered showers and thunderstorms in the area. The high heat and humidity expected for this evening in Atlanta should be quite favorable for baseballs to carry so there are likely to be some mammoth shots in Truist Park. Winds will not be much of a factor during the next couple of nights, but a recent detailed analysis confirms the notion that winds can be highly influential in the distance a ball can travel and there were some surprising findings.
Details
Studies have shown that weather conditions can affect the distance a baseball can travel by more than 20% depending on the temperature, humidity, winds, and atmospheric pressure. The less dense the air, the greater distance a baseball can carry, and tonight’s high heat and humidity in Atlanta should be very favorable for some deep shots during the annual Home Run Derby. Temperatures will soar to well above normal levels in the middle 90’s for late day highs and they’ll be slow to drop during the evening hours and overall humidity levels will remain uncomfortably high.
Far more home runs were “prevented” by wind during this two-year time period than were “created” in ballparks like Wrigley Field (Chicago) and Kaufmann Stadium (Kansas City). (Courtesy MLB.com)
Another factor that influences the density of the air and the ability of a ball to travel is the altitude of a given stadium and Atlanta’s Truist Park is the 3rd highest in all big-league baseball. Truist Park which opened in April 2017 sits at around 1000 feet just behind Arizona’s Chase Field (1086 feet) in altitude and far behind the highest…Coors Field in Denver (5190 feet). The relatively high altitude in Atlanta is yet another favorable factor for the possibility of seeing some tape-measure type home runs during tonight’s Home Run Derby.
Wrigley Field has the most wind-affected balls (25 feet or more), and it's really not even close. (Courtesy MLB.com)
Winds are another important weather-related factor that can strongly influence the distance a baseball can travel. Winds can be quite supportive of the hitting of home runs (blowing out) or they can be quite detrimental (blowing in). Wrigley Field in Chicago is well known for those very high scoring games featuring numerous long HRs onto Waveland Avenue when winds are blowing out on a hot summer day (or night). However, a somewhat surprising finding regarding Wrigley Field came about recently in a detailed wind analysis by Major League Baseball using all games from the 2023 and 2024 seasons. As it turned out, winds were far more often to be detrimental in Wrigley Field when it came to hitting home runs and this was the finding in other stadiums as well including Kaufmann Stadium in Kansas City, T-Mobile Park in Seattle, and Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia. Specifically, there 56 balls “prevented” by the wind from being home runs at Wrigley Field in Chicago with only 13 HRs “created”. The results were even more dramatic in Kansas City where 67 balls were “prevented” from being HRs by the wind and only 2 were “created”. In Philly and Seattle, big discrepancies took place as well during this two-year period with the ratio of “prevented” and “created” 48 to 3 in Philly and 55 to 0 in Seattle.
The key to this finding that the wind can be more detrimental to the hitting of home runs rather than supportive has to do with the typical orientation of the field and the basic structure of the stadium. Most big-league parks are oriented from south-southwest to north-northeast with home plate placed on the south-southwest side of the field and the center field fence on the north-northeast side. This has been tradition from way back in the early seasons of baseball in order to have the sun behind the batter and not a hinderance to their vision when facing the pitcher. Given this typical orientation, low-level winds blowing out from a S/SW direction are disrupted or impeded by the fully enclosed section of seats that wraparound from the 1st base side to the 3rd base side. In the outfield, however, low-level winds blowing in from a N/NE direction are usually far less disrupted or impeded with limited seats out there and only scoreboards a possible hinderance. This is indeed the case at Wrigley Field in Chicago where winds blowing in from center field have far less in the way of obstacles to the winds blowing out from behind home plate.
One final note, of the 8 participating players in tonight’s Home Run Derby, the longest HR hit during the 2025 season was 479 feet by Byron Buxton of the Minnesota Twins on June 11th versus the Texas Rangers…may very well see something greater than that tonight in Atlanta.
Meteorologist Paul Dorian
Arcfield
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