Sandy Alderson makes measured rather than rash decisions. He even brought Oliver Perez and Luis Castillo to spring training to observe those players before dumping them, despite public clamor for their immediate ousters. So it is entirely consistent that Alderson left Citi Field’s measurements unchanged for the 2011 season, his first presiding over the team as general manager.

That does not mean alterations will not take place next winter.

– Adam Rubin, ESPN.com.

Rubin digs up some good quotes from Sandy Alderson from the time Alderson reworked the fence at San Diego’s cavernous Petco Park and gets data from Greg Rybarczyk of hittrackeronline.com, so the whole piece is worth a read.

It’s worth noting that according to most park-factor metrics I can find, Citi Field has hardly been the most extreme pitchers’ park in the league. I’ve found five sites charting park-factor stats online: ESPN.com, baseball-reference.com, seamheads.com, parkfactors.com and statcorner.com.

All of them show Citi Field playing as at least a slight pitchers’ park, but none of them put it at the bottom or even in the bottom three for run-scoring environments. And I seem to remember fans almost unanimously hoping for a pitchers’ park before the place opened in 2009. Also — and this is a big thing people seem to overlook all the time — visiting teams have to hit in Citi Field too.

Most of the sites do show that Citi is a tough park to hit home runs in, which, naturally, our eyes also show. Of course, it is an especially hard park to hit home runs in when you’re trotting out a lineup full of guys that don’t often hit home runs, as the Mets frequently do. And there’s a lot more to how a park plays than the distance of its fences: the batter’s eye, the amount of foul territory, the lights, the wind.

Regardless, there’s little doubt the perception around baseball is that the park is damn-near impossible to hit the ball out of, and at this point there’s nothing you or me or Troy Tulowitzki can do to dispel that. Many suggest the stadium has had psychological effects on certain Mets hitters, but I try to avoid armchair psychoanalysis here.

What I would say is that if Alderson concludes that some minor alterations to the wall would in some way benefit the team for the long haul — enticing free agents, drawing more fans to the park because chicks (and many other people) dig the longball, whatever — then why not? I was never a fan of the current fence aesthetically from the start, with the weird and unnecessary nooks and crannies, so maybe the Mets can upgrade the park cosmetically and eliminate a talking point that has probably always been a bit overblown.

Thanks to @sky_kalkman, @thomasTSKH, @jeffpaternostro and @nmigliore for helping me find park-factor stats via Twitter. Dan at Baseball Crank put together a useful roundup of the Mets’ home/road splits since they started playing at Citi Field in 2009.