<Anchor>
The home stadium of Lotte, a professional baseball team, has been expanded to be pitcher-friendly.
Lotte players, who started their first training, stick out their tongues.
This is reporter Bae Jung-hoon.
<Reporter>
After last season, Lotte started remodeling to expand the Sajik Stadium.
Sajik Stadium after two months of renovation work.
Now the place has entered a new season with a completely different look.
The distance to the central fence was increased to 120.5 m by pulling the home plate back close to 3 m, and the fence was raised 1.2 m to 6 m.
It made it difficult to hit a home run.
There were shouts from the mouths of the batters who went to the first training in the changed stadium,
[Lee Dae-ho: I can’t go over (the fence) even when I practice betting.
] I felt it.
But originally, I can't get over it well when I practice hitting.]
The pitchers who were relieved of the burden of home runs were satisfied.
[Park Se-woong/Lotte Pitcher: The left middle right middle seems to have grown very large, and the fence itself is high, so I think that there are definitely many advantages to the pitcher...
.]
This transformation was made by Lotte to compensate for the extreme imbalance in pitching.
Last year, Lotte ranked first in team batting average and most hits, while ranked lowest in batting average and team ERA. In particular, at Sajik Stadium, they hit 11 more home runs than when they were away, which was a big hit.
In the end, the field was widened to minimize the mound's weakness and win with hits rather than home runs.
It is noteworthy whether the cause of Sajik Stadium's transformation will lead to meaningful results.
(Video coverage: Gong Jin-gu, Jeon Gyeong-bae, video editing: Woo-jung, CG: Lim Chan-hyeok, Kim Jeong-eun, Jo Su-in)