Is the New Turf at the Rogers Centre Really a Problem?

The Blue Jays finished their first home stand of the season at the Rogers Centre yesterday, and the discussion surrounding the games has been a little strange so far. The talk has been about the performance of the team, who have started well, but it’s also been about the artificial turf that was installed this past offseason. Is it bouncy? Is it not bouncy enough? Are the balls always rolling foul off of the first and third base lines? These are questions we end up asking when baseball is played on a surface other than grass.

That’s not to say that playing on turf is an inherently terrible thing, it’s just different, and if the choice is between playing baseball or not playing baseball in a climate that might not support grass, the choice is obvious. Still, with the news that Toronto hopes to move to an all-grass field by 2018, and with the continuing talk that seems to arise every year from playing in stadiums with artificial turf, we should look into it further.

First, the fuel for the fire. This was the play that started everyone talking about the new surface, a swinging bunt in a game from Monday of last week that took a very strange bounce in front of the plate:

Here’s a closer angle:

Yes, it’s a weird one. You expect those swinging bunts to have topspin and roll forward, but there’s a lot of things that go into this, including the ball looking like it hit the front of the plate on the first bounce. Could it be the new turf? Absolutely. But this type of bounce can and certainly does happened on grass fields.

One of the chief complaints from players is that the new turf is slow, causing ground balls to be fielded when they might’ve otherwise been hits through the infield. Here’s Jose Bautista on the subject:

“It’s weird, but we’re going to have to adjust,” he said. “It’s definitely a lot slower than it was in the past and a lot slower than any other artificial turf I’ve ever laid my feet on.”

The Orioles just finished a three-game set yesterday in Toronto — one in which they were swept — and they also complained about the turf, going so far as to contact MLB about it and consider not playing on Tuesday night. That was most likely spurred by Jimmy Paredes getting hurt on a ball to the face from a bad hop while taking grounders in batting practice, and less about getting swept, but it’s still news.

Many of the complaints from the Orioles also had to do with the slow nature of the turf. With that in mind, first let’s see if the BABIP for the Rogers Centre is any lower this season compared to other parks. Here’s a chart of the BABIPs for all 30 stadiums so far this season:

Toronto is just a bit low, but it’s near the center of the pack, and at face value there’s not a lot of weight to support the claims that the turf is glaringly slowing balls in play down. Further, if we isolate just the average on ground balls this season at the Rogers Centre (which is what is at issue here), we get a .297 mark, far above the league average on ground balls from 2014 (.239). If the complaint is that the turf is depressing hits on ground balls, that does not bear out in the data we have so far.

How about extra base hits? Is the Rogers Centre taking would-be doubles and turning them into singles, or would-be triples into doubles? To find out, let’s take home runs out of the slugging marks at each ballpark to get an adjusted slugging stat for just singles, doubles, and triples. After all, the Rogers Centre is known for being a home run haven. Take a look:

Again, Toronto’s ballpark is in the middle of the pack, with nothing glaring to speak of. There’s obviously a lot that goes into extra base hits that could influence this data, but this early on, we’d probably be able to tell if a number of would-be doubles were going for singles due to the small sample size.

Even though they’re not the greatest way to measure fielding (we’re still waiting on some of our advanced metrics that might tell us more), there also hasn’t been any uptick in errors at the Rogers Centre. It’s very early, and errors are subjective, but if the turf was causing fielding problems to the tune of far more errors per game, we’d know about it. That hasn’t happened. One thing that is easily noticeable about Toronto is that balls bounce higher than usual, but fielders are briefed before series to expect that. The bottom line is that weird bounces happen everywhere, and major league fielders adjust to them.

Finally, I looked at whether new installations of turf have depressed BABIP in the past, specifically at the Rogers Centre and Tropicana Field. Here’s a graph of the BABIPs for those two stadiums for the years of 2005-2014, with annotations on when the turf was replaced (meaning the turf was replaced prior to that season):

Both years saw dips in BABIP after new turf was installed, especially Tropicana Field, which cratered to .264. Does that mean anything? Maybe, maybe not – there’s a lot that goes into BABIP, and year to year variability is expected. Still, it’s interesting, and it’s food for thought for this year as the season progresses. One difference between the two examples in the graph and the new turf at the Rogers Centre is that the latter is a type of artificial turf that hasn’t ever been installed in a major league stadium — it doesn’t have the sand infill of previous turf installations, so it could be a little softer and bouncier.

MLB is probably more worried about Toronto having an advantage from playing at the Rogers Centre rather than any negative outcomes on batted balls and fielding during games. As we can see, there isn’t much to support the turf having a serious influence on BABIP, extra base hits, or fielding so far this season. This is another issue created by a few strange events that happen elsewhere, they’re just zeroed-in on and dissected (ahem) because there was new turf installed this past offseason. A simple search for articles published directly after new turf was installed previously yields many of the same complaints we’re seeing now. In all likelihood, everyone will get used to playing on the turf when they visit Toronto, and this issue will fade into obscurity as the season goes on.