At the end of August, there was a scary incident at the Houston Astros’ home ballpark, Daikin Park. Los Angeles Angels’ left fielder Taylor Ward went back for a fly ball and ran into the left field wall with a lot of impact, and it led to him being removed from the game.
Daikin Park is one of those baseball fields with funky dimensions, as the left field serves as a short porch, but the left-center area is much deeper and has a distinct triangular pattern that can cause
Recently, Angels’ interim manager Ray Mongomery spoke out on how the Astros can make the field safer.
Montgomery says the field needs to be “Fixed and addressed”
“That was a steel beam that he hit out there,” Montgomery said. “It wasn’t concrete. It wasn’t padded. It wasn’t protected. It wasn’t the aluminum numbers that they used. So that needs to be fixed and addressed, for sure.”
Taylor Ward ended up having to get 20 stitches around his eye to repair a blood vessel, and he’s not the only Angels player who has had problems with the wall. Outfielder Jo Adell had a similar situation happen to him back in 2021, where he hurt his oblique and ended up missing a month and a half of that season due to Daikin Park’s wall dimensions.
So how could Houston fix the park? This remains the unclear part. They have a majority of their seats in the left field area, and there are additional seats above the high left-center field wall. However, they have been open to making tweaks to the park, as the most recent one was getting rid of the bizarre and funky “Tal’s Hill”, which proved to be A. really difficult for hitters to hit home runs and B. really hard for outfielders to field beyond the 400-foot mark.
