Current MLB ballpark · 1973 – present
Kauffman Stadium
Kansas City, MO
Also known as Royals Stadium.
- Opened
- 1973
- Capacity
- 38,427
- Surface
- Grass
- Roof
- Open
- League
- AL
- Elevation
- 856 ft
- Orientation
- 46° (NE)
- Time zone
- America/Chicago
How it plays
Every number is an index where 100 is league average. There is no such thing as one park factor — this park does different things to a triple than it does to a home run, and the only honest version is the whole row. Off 17,635 plate appearances in 2026.
| 2026 | 2024-2026 | |
|---|---|---|
| Runs | 114 | 104 |
| Home runs | 105 | 89 |
| Triples | 119 | 164 |
| Doubles | 123 | 118 |
| Singles | 103 | 102 |
| Walks | 105 | 100 |
| Strikeouts | 85 | 88 |
| Value on contact | 103 | 99 |
| Expected on contact | 103 | 102 |
How much of this is the park? Across 2022–2026, this venue's single-season value-on-contact index moved by ±2.8 points (a 8-point spread over 5 seasons). The league median is 3.0. Read a single season's figure with that much slack in it — the walls do not move, and the number does.
By the batter's side
| Runs | 114 RHB | 112 LHB |
| Home runs | 116 RHB | 96 LHB |
| Value on contact | 103 RHB | 104 LHB |
8,865 right-handed and 8,770 left-handed plate appearances — each side is half a season, so read these with at least the slack the combined figures carry — the band above is ±2.8 on twice this sample.
What FVR does about it
Every luck gap we measure at this park has −0.0089 subtracted from it, off 4,390 balls in play here this season. That is the number behind every board on this site, which is the only reason it is printed. It is not on the 100-is-average scale above: it is value on contact per ball in play, so it cannot be added to or subtracted from any index in this table. The two can even point opposite ways — Savant's runs index counts all offense, ours is only the residual against what the batted balls deserved.
Index figures: Baseball Savant, single-season and three-year rolling. What a park factor is, and is not →
The lore
The Fountain and the Field
A park built for baseball in the cookie-cutter era, with a 322-foot fountain that has been there since the first summer.
The Water
A 322-foot wide fountain system stretches along the outfield — the largest privately funded fountain in the world when it debuted on July 21, 1973, three months after the park opened. That fountain has been part of the place from the start, in a park built specifically for baseball during an era when multisport cookie-cutter stadiums were common.
Royals Stadium opened on April 10, 1973, a 12-1 Royals win over the Texas Rangers before 39,464 fans. Ground was broken on July 11, 1968. The design was by Kivett and Myers, the construction by the joint venture of Sharp, Kidde, and Webb. The park sits next door to Arrowhead Stadium, home of the Chiefs, as part of the Truman Sports Complex.
What the Field Held
The park was five weeks old when Nolan Ryan threw the first of his seven career no-hitters there, blanking the Royals 3-0 on May 15, 1973, three batters shy of a perfect game.
On October 27, 1985, the Royals clinched their first World Series title on this field — an 11-0 Game 7 over the St. Louis Cardinals. Bret Saberhagen pitched the shutout. Darryl Motley hit a two-run homer. The Royals had lost the first two games of that Series at home and came back to win, the first team to do it.
In 2014, Kansas City trailed Oakland 7-3 in the eighth inning of the AL Wild Card Game and rallied to win 9-8 in extras, ending a nearly 29-year playoff drought. That October the park hosted Games 1, 2, 6, and 7 of the World Series.
The park was renamed Kauffman Stadium on July 2, 1993, for Ewing M. Kauffman, the Royals' founder and first owner. A $250 million renovation between 2007 and 2009 added a new Royals Hall of Fame area and facility updates. The All-Star Game came in 1973 and again in 2012.
The Royals have played here since the park opened. The fountain still runs.
Reporting: MLB.com, Wikipedia. Park data: MLB StatsAPI and Retrosheet, via the Fever engine.
By the Desk · filed 2026-07-23 — the piece reads as of its filing; the park record around it is live · every fact in this piece comes from a filed, sourced research pack and clears an independent fact-check, and nothing is edited after filing.
The dimensions
Fence distances from home plate, in feet — the same venue.fieldInfo the scorecards draw their hit charts on.
| Left field line | 347′ |
| Left field | 364′ |
| Left-center | 379′ |
| Center field | 410′ |
| Right-center | 379′ |
| Right field | 364′ |
| Right field line | 344′ |
Home club
Games we’ve scored here
81 games at this park in our books — every one transcribed mark for mark, reconciled to the official line. The most recent:
- 2026-09-27CLE 2 – 3 KC
- 2026-09-26CLE 11 – 5 KC
- 2026-09-25CLE 12 – 9 KC
- 2026-09-24CWS 9 – 1 KC
- 2026-09-23CWS 4 – 5 KC
- 2026-09-22CWS 14 – 11 KC
- 2026-09-09AZ 2 – 5 KC
- 2026-09-08AZ 5 – 3 KC
- 2026-09-07AZ 5 – 4 KC
- 2026-09-06TOR 1 – 6 KC
- 2026-09-05TOR 4 – 3 KC
- 2026-09-04TOR 9 – 2 KC
…and 69 more in the scorecard archive.
Where it stands
One Royal Way, Kansas City, MO 64129. Open the map →
Sources
- MLB StatsAPI · as of 2026-07-23
- Retrosheet · as of 2026-07-23
The information used here was obtained free of charge from and is copyrighted by Retrosheet. Interested parties may contact Retrosheet at 20 Sunset Rd., Newark, DE 19711.