MLB: Toronto Blue Jays at Kansas City Royals
Jay Biggerstaff

Our rankings for the 2026 Fantasy Baseball season are live, and you can check them out for myself, Scott White, and Frank Stampfl here. Though a fair warning here: They might already be out of date! 

At least for the Kansas City Royals in the player pool, that is. Because the Royals announced Tuesday morning that they are bringing in the fences in Kauffman Stadium. As the team explained: 

"The wall will come in 8 to 10 feet starting near each foul pole -- the gaps will go from 387 feet to 379 -- and taper back toward centerfield, which will remain 410 feet. The height of the wall will also change, from 10 feet tall in most places to 8 ½ feet."

The idea here is simple, and the team isn't hiding it: They want more offense. Kauffman has been a notoriously difficult place to hit homers, ranking 25th in the majors in home run park factor over the past four seasons. So, arrow pointing up for all of our Royals hitters, right?

Well, not exactly. For one thing, not every player will be impacted by this evenly. Guys who hit the ball down the lines will benefit the most, while hitters who hit the ball to the "pull side" in the air, but more in the direction of the power alleys, will probably benefit less.

Looking at someone like Vinnie Pasquantino, I'm not sure how much juice is left to squeeze out of his batted ball profile – he hits a lot of balls in the air to the pull side, but when you look at his batted ball spray chart, you don't see many balls down right right field line that could plausibly turn into homers with a shortened fence. Salvador Perez, on the other hand, has a bunch of doubles and outs out in deep left field that could conceivably turn into homers, even though he is more of an all-fields power hitter than Pasquantino, who didn't have a single homer to the left side of center field in 2025. 

And then there's this: While Kauffman has been a tough place to hit homers, that's not the same thing as saying it has been a tough place to hit. Over the past three seasons, it ranks as the sixth-best hitter's park in baseball, making up for what it loses in homers with huge increases in doubles and triples, not to mention the lowest strikeout park factor thanks to a great visual. Some of those doubles and triples will surely turn into homers, but some of them will just as surely turn into outs as outfielders have less room to cover. 

Which is to say, don't react to this by just moving every single Royals hitter up. It should play as an even more offense-friendly park, but it's not like you can just say, "Homers are going up, so offense will go up!" Homers are relatively rare (though obviously very impactful) events, and the impact for any given hitter will be tough to project. And even if it does lead to an across-the-board improvement in offense in Kansas City, that only represents half of any given hitter's games, so we're probably only talking about a couple of extra projected homers even in an optimistic view. 

Don't overreact, in other words. If you want to bump Perez up a bit, I won't argue; I'm probably not moving Pasquantino up at all, though I'm open to being moved on that. But if you view the new dimensions in Kansas City as a viable tie-breaker between, say, Maikel Garcia (ADP: 77.9) and Austin Riley (74.0), I think that's reasonable enough, though.