Fantasy baseball's Week 12 begins slightly earlier than usual, as the St. Louis Cardinals and Washington Nationals recognize Juneteenth at Washington's Nationals Park, with the game's scheduled first pitch set for 4:05 p.m. ET.
The Cardinals' week then concludes in England, with the two-game London Series 2023 featuring the worst-in-the-National League Cards and the Chicago Cubs playing at London Stadium on Saturday and Sunday, with first pitches scheduled for 1:10 p.m. ET and 10 a.m. ET, respectively, with Sunday's game on ESPN.
Both teams, understandably, are among the five that play only five times during Week 12, as they'll have Thursday and Friday (as well as the following Monday, June 26) off for their international travel.
For fantasy managers' planning purposes, London Stadium has hitting-friendly outfield dimensions and saw 50 runs scored, 65 total hits and 10 home runs the only other time a two-game, regular-season series was played there, that one between the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees in June 2019. The venue's distance to the center-field wall, measured at 385 feet, is shorter than that at any of the 30 regularly used stadiums, though the wall's height is 16 feet to compensate.
Additionally, to account for the hitting-friendly outfield measurements -- and because of the difficulty in cleanly converting a soccer venue to one for baseball -- the venue's foul territory measures 44,500 square feet, or nearly 4,000 more than the largest among the 30 current MLB stadiums, at the Oakland Coliseum.
As such, the Forecaster's park factors for those two games have been adjusted to compensate, just as they were for the San Francisco Giants at San Diego Padres series at Mexico City's Alfredo Harp Helu Stadium on April 29-30. Unlike in those games, altitude won't influence the park effects for the London Series, though the field dimensions do alter them significantly.
The projections take an estimate drawn from the similarly structured Coliseum, Chicago's Guaranteed Rate Field, Philadelphia's Citizens Bank Park and Seattle's T-Mobile Park, then inflates the hitting factors by approximately 8% (for the smaller area of fair territory). Tuck that away for your fantasy planning, as the effect for our purposes is roughly a three-point drop in each starting pitcher's projection relative to what it would've been at St. Louis' Busch Stadium (the Cardinals are the "home team").