Tampa Bay Rays news and links: Yankee Stadium is short to right field

Bill Chastain talked to Kevin Kiermaier about his slump, and to Evan Longoria about his plantar fasciitis. Said Longo about Daniel Robertson, filling in at third base:

"He's looked great," Longoria said. "I better get back out there, I don't want to lose my job. I don't want to get Wally Pipped. [Robertson] knows I'm hot on his heels."

Links:

• After Adam Jones discussed hearing shouted racist slurs from fans at Fenway Park, Mark Topkin talked to Rickie Weeks, who says that yes, this is something that happens in major league stadiums more than people think.
• Jason Hanselman looked at the Rays offense and noted that after a bit of a detour for a year or two, this team is once more a three true outcomes (homers, strikeouts, walks) offense.
• Okay, so this is really cool. Because ballparks don’t allow writers to bring survey teams onto the field and measure things, it’s hard to know exactly how large they are (especially if you don’t trust the markings). But Travis Sawchik was clever. He used Statcast fly ball distances to measure Yankee Stadium’s right-field wall. And the answer is that yes, Yankee Stadium’s right field is every bit the short, homer-creating, game distorting short porch you thought it was. The dimensions probably aren’t illegal, but they’re bending the stadium size rules.
• And staying on the stadium topic, Andrew Perpetua talked about modeling the wind in the Brave’s new stadium. Cool stuff.
• Baseball attendance!
• KATOH is a metric that tries to evaluate and project minor leaguers based on their stats. One Ray made the list of most-improved KATOH projections by his performance so far this year.