Sixteen games, or roughly 20%, of the Baltimore Orioles' home schedule is in the books, and early returns indicate that the park dimension adjustments made during the winter have dramatically impacted how Camden Yards has played.
While the team had hoped pushing the left field fence back to 384 feet and left-center field fence to 400 feet would make Camden Yards a more neutral environment, the venue has played like an extreme pitchers' park thus far. The stats confirm this, as Camden Yards has the lowest home-run rate (1.4% of all trips to the plate), second-lowest average runs per game (6.81) and lowest isolated power (.104) in baseball. As the deeper outfield fences were all installed in left and left-center fields, it's also worth noting that right-handed hitters have a second-lowest home run rate at 1.5%, just behind the 1.6% at Pittsburgh's PNC Park.
Before we get ahead of ourselves, a few things to bear in mind: Park factors often vacillate year over year, and they should never be sternly judged off a fraction of a single season. Additionally, the above statistics aren't, in fact, park factors, which rather compare a team and its opponents' production at its home venue to the teams' performance in road games. It's merely a quick glance, but even taken in a casual sense, it appears that something different is afoot at Camden Yards in 2022.
That's why two of Week 6's most attractive two-start pitching candidates are starters scheduled to take at least one turn at Camden Yards. Yusei Kikuchi (56.9% available in ESPN leagues) of the Toronto Blue Jays is the first. He is well worth a pickup in his own right, but the one profiled below plays for the team that has one of the very best all-around weekly schedules, in part because of a three-game weekend series at Baltimore.