ABSTRACT
[The owner of the Boston Braves, James Gaffney] wanted a ballpark conducive to inside-the-park home runs, his favorite kind of baseball action, and that’s just what he designed. The new park [Braves Field] was laid out so that the distance from home plate was 402 feet down each foul line and 550 feet to dead center. These wide-open spaces generated plenty of triples and inside-the-park homers, but the corollary was that hardly anyone could muscle the ball out of the park for a real honest-to-goodness Babe Ruth–type home run. …
Braves field succeeded admirably in producing inside-the-park homers. In 1921, for example, 34 out of 38 home runs hit there were of the inside-the-park variety. … Responding to fan demand, Braves management joined the parade and in 1928 pulled in the outfield fences by installing new bleachers in left and center fields. These shrank home-run distances to 320 feet down the left-field line, 330 feet to left center, 387 to center, and 364 feet down the right-field line. … [It is noted that many homeruns were hit.] Back to the drawing board. Hard to believe, but starting in 1928 the dimensions of Braves Field were altered almost annually.
—Lawrence S. Ritter, Lost Ballparks: A Celebration of Baseball’s Legendary Fields