How Many Times Did the Red Sox Hit It to the Center Field Triangle?

There are approximately one million reasons to love Fenway Park. Just for starters, there’s the fact that it’s the oldest stadium in baseball and the way it allows the fans to get closer to the game than they do anywhere else. Personally, I love a good quirk that affects the game on the field, and Fenway features plenty of those. From the Green Monster to the Pesky Pole to the fact that there’s virtually no foul territory to speak of, Fenway throws an abundance of curves at its fielders. Today, I’d like to talk about the center field triangle, the feature that makes Fenway one of the friendliest spots to hit a triple. According to Statcast’s Park Factors, it’s 18% more likely to allow a triple than the average stadium.

The odd angle of the cutout, the weird recessed garage door, the way the low, sloping right field wall intersects the high left field wall; it’s like center field was specifically designed to facilitate maximum chaos. Even a visitor from outer space could look down at that gigantic, weird triangle of warning track dirt and know that something freaky was going on.

But after that preamble, I have to tell you some terrible news. The Red Sox only sent one base hit into the triangle on the fly during the 2024 season. Just one! Are you ready for the world’s loneliest spray chart? Here you go.

That’s it. The one yellow dot was a triple off the bat of Wilyer Abreu against the Brewers back in May. To be clear, I’m just talking about balls hit into the triple on the fly. Jarren Duran hit two triples into the triangle, but both landed well short and then rolled in. Still, that makes just three all season. It was a real down year for base hits into the triangle. This is the entire highlight reel.

I did a series of Statcast searches in order to find out how many times the Red Sox hit the ball into the triangle – only for base hits – over the past nine years. Aside from the short 2020 season, in which they hit two balls into the triangle, the 2024 season was tied for the bottom.

It’s a bit surprising considering that the Sox hit 30 triples in 2024, their second-highest total of that period. Moreover, 36% of their batted balls went to center field, and 40% were hard-hit; both of those rates were the third-highest in that timeframe. By all rights, they should have been peppering the triangle this season. So what went wrong? For starters, outfielders have been playing much deeper over the past 10 years or so. That trend allows more balls to fall in for singles in front of them, but it also means that the kinds of hard-hit balls that once would have found their way into the triangle now end up in gloves. In 2017, the league had a .251 batting average on fly balls. In 2024, that average was all the way down to .217.

But after that, it’s mostly randomness. Sometimes the ball just doesn’t go to one particular spot. In 2024, 37% of the balls the Red Sox hit in the air went to center field, the exact same as the league average. However, that number was just 35.4% when they were playing at home in Fenway. That was the fourth-lowest rate in the league, and the lowest the Sox have put up at home in the entire Statcast era. There’s no way that could be anything but statistical noise. The GIF below shows all balls they hit to center field over the past two seasons, and I’ve highlighted the center field triangle.

That’s not a skill issue. It just kind of happened. Unfortunately, this random effect also robbed us of one of the most exciting plays in baseball. There’s always next year.