White Sox favorites vs. Yankees in baseball nostalgia showcase – The Athletic

The Chicago White Sox and New York Yankees will experience a 1980s movie playing in front of a cornfield in Iowa for the Field of Dreams game on Thursday.

The game, which takes place at 7 p.m. EST on Fox, is played in Dyersville, Iowa. The stadium was built just for this game and holds 8,000 seats, which is a lot bigger than anything the movie “Field of Dreams” used on Ray Kinsella’s farm. The iconic pitch used for the film is adjacent to the stadium.

Some of the dimensions and appearance of the stadium are built to resemble Old Comiskey Park, the home of the White Sox from 1910 to 1990. Scott Dochterman has an in-depth look at how the stadium and the game came into being.

The stadium for Thursday’s game is 335 feet along the lines, 380 feet in the fairways and 400 feet in the middle. It has a 12 foot wall in the center and smaller 7 foot walls in the corners.

The broadcast will also be somewhat unique, with Fox putting a lot of resources into the production. Dozens of cameras and microphones, multiple aerial drones, and stylized graphics tailored to the theme will create an unusual viewing experience. Additionally, the game will be available in 4K / HDR. Richard Deitsch has more on Fox’s production of Field of Dreams.

Lance Lynn is starting for the White Sox, which will be the home team, against Andrew Heaney for the Yankees. Lynn was a late change after Carlos Rodon, the initially scheduled starter, entered the injured list on Wednesday. Lynn is the leader of the MLB ERA. The White Sox have been good against lefties for the past two seasons and that might be truer now that remarkable right-handed hitters Eloy Jimenez and Luis Robert are back in the lineup after extended injuries.

White Sox manager Tony La Russa will not be with the squad. Miguel Cairo will lead the team while La Russa will attend the funeral of her sister’s husband.

The White Sox are favored at -165 on the moneyline while the Yankees are at +140. The total is 9.5. Derek Carty’s THE BAT X model gives the White Sox a 53% chance of winning, meaning the model sees the Yankees as the value game of both, with an expected total of 9.38. All model choices for today’s games are available here.

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To learn more about the game and the odds, Carty answered a few questions about the game.

How do you think the park will perform based on dimensions and other factors?

Carty: Projecting parks with no data always comes with wide error bars, because there is so much that can impact how a park plays that we just can never know. How are the balls stored? How are they scrambled? How is the grounds maintenance? How will the wind interact with the different elements of the park? And so on. But what we do know about Field of Dreams is that the dimensions are more or less average. We know that the height of the fence in the central field (12 feet) is above average, and the height of the rest of the fences (7 feet) is slightly below average. We know Dyersville sits at an elevation of about 950 feet, which would be the fourth highest level in baseball behind Coors, Chase and SunTrust. It’s a long way from Coors, but it’s high enough above sea level where we should expect him to play with hitters, all other things being equal. I should also mention that it will be 88 degrees with 12 mph blowing at LF tomorrow (at least, in the early forecast), which will make it even more hitter-friendly.

Does your model take into account the additions of the trade deadline? If so, how much have the Yankees and White Sox improved?

Carty: Yes, THE BAT projects everything at the level of the individual player. It will depend on who’s in roster on any given day, but the additions of (Joey) Gallo and (Anthony) Rizzo will absolutely lead to the Yankees projecting themselves better than they otherwise would have. Chicago added an above-average hitter to Cesar Hernandez and some decent box arms, so it will all end up in the projection.

Scenarios for the White Sox-Yankees

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